... But who's counting ...

From what I remember, somebody once said: “Don’t get a job, choose a career and whatever it is, do the best you can.”
I’m glad I followed that advice.
Because those words have motivated me throughout my career.
I looked up today and it dawned on me that I am in my fourth decade of professional Word Smithing!
From the IBM Model D, the Selectric models that followed and even the old word processor I used to pound out scripts at 212 Fifth Avenue, technology has come a long way but to me only one thing remains: The idea has to come before the execution.
Next time you look at a spot, see if you think somebody came up with that commercial with a solution to the client's problem first instead of an animation house they've been wanting to work with 'like forever'.
Or: (my favorite lately!) "I've got an idea! Let's use that song, you know the one, my Dad used to love it. The lyrics are ... you know ... let me Google it!"
And lo and behold; the client's Dad used to love that song, too. A $5,000,000 spot is born.
It doesn't matter that Ad Week and Advertising Age pan the crap out of the spot because it wins a Lion - for most money ever spent on a :30 spot not appearing in the Super Bowl - and the lazy creative guy who came up with the spot (such as it was because all he did download the mp3 and email it to the agency producer who emailed it to the animation house and they did all the heavy lifting) gets a big raise and a promotion.
The animation house is richer, the long-suffering, one-hit wonder of an artist gets a much needed big payday and because the media buy is so huge he/she gets to make the rounds of morning news shows so we can see how much they've aged and ask ourselves why we ever liked the song in the first place ... the song is revived and is covered by Enya or somebody like that and iTunes® reports record download sales and on and on so much so that Oprah doesn't give up her show, stages a huge comeback and buys the rights to the screen play about the life and loves of the creative guy who came up with the spot who by now, one year later, is also making the rounds of the morning shows and the various late night shows touting his best-selling autobiography and never forgets to tell us over and over that it was all because of his Dad who liked this song.
Because I am driven by what can only be called an old fashioned work ethic and the need for my work to stand apart from others, I should probably mention that yes, I have done what I call 'borrowed interest' work. But I have always been dragged kicking and screaming out of those meetings when such creative decisions were made and I had to write them. I generally worked harder than I should've on those spots.
That's because I always want to be proud of my work.
And because I mostly feel lucky that I got to choose my vocation. I chose to be a writer, but I know because of those important 16 words, it wouldn’t matter what had I chosen to do, because I would be working just as hard at that as I do at this.
Now I'm not hating.
I don't hate people who don't have careers.
I don't hate people who didn't have the opportunity to pick their current work.
I don't even hate people who hate what they do to earn their paychecks even though many make so much money I wonder how dare they not like it and how dare they complain about going every day to get that money and how double dare they not do a good job while they are there getting all that money.
I truly do believe that if we as Americans start to choose our careers instead of just taking jobs we will be a happier more productive people.
And for goodness sakes, why can't "a job" be a career?
A doorman, a butler, a wait person, a bus driver, a cabbie, a dish washer or whatever. People used to do those kinds of things and took their jobs seriously and made good money for their service.
If we were brave enough (and not so stupidly narcissistic!) to wash toilets or change bedding in a hotel or pick up after and baby sit other people’s children, or pump gas, mow grass or any other of what we now consider menial jobs, then we wouldn’t have other people coming in from the four corners of the earth to do those jobs.
And then:
We would not have people hating those other people for doing what they refuse to consider good, hard and honest work. From what I know of history, the Roman Empire was destroyed by it’s own refusal to see it’s inner workings not working. Over the past sixty years we’ve managed to whittle away that great can do attitude that helped us produce an infrastructure that at one time completely marveled the rest of the world.
Now most of the world kind of hides behind their hands as they laugh at our puny little 4G networks.
The International Advertising World certainly does laugh at our puny attempts at sophistication.
"Silly Puritans." They remark upon viewing the latest promotion for some Vegas Casino.
Silly indeed. We need to work on that. Less sophomoronic, please.
I was always asked: “How do you do it?” after writing and producing as many as seventeen to twenty radio and television commercials in a single week.
I don't know. I didn't think about it. I didn't count I just did.
Forty years. And I'm still not counting.

The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

So do you think that the new marketing ploy is to just scare everyone into submission? I do. The pharma companies have been at it for a while. Their magazine ads which look so pretty and promise so much (with headlines and design apparently by art directors!) but when you turn the page there is the advertising equivalent of Revelations staring at you.
I generally shudder whenever I see an agency looking for writers to work on Pharma stuff.
The discalimers for those ads are usually about 5,000 words in 6pt type warning you that to ingest their product would be as harmful as smoking cigarettes or sprinkling salt on your food, or eating butter, or drinking whole milk, or eating anything that doesn't have "lite" in it's name or in general doing anything that your Grandparents did. And didn't they live to be like 90 years old without all these pills and diets and such?
What I'm saying is that if you want to cure yourself from burping, there's a pill for that.
But, as you may have heard in their TV spots, there are some side effects associated with such drugs.
I've seen and heard these spots so many times I can almost do the voice over (although the FDA makes them put the words on the screen, too) from memory.
It starts with scary in the form of: constipation; diarrhea; headache; nausea; pain, swelling, or redness as well as additional stomach pain.
But wait, there's more! Here's where it's gets even scarier! You can suffer from: Severe allergic reactions like rash; hives; itching; difficulty breathing; tightness in the chest; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue; unusual hoarseness when talking. Then there's bone pain; chest pain; fast or irregular heartbeat; fever, chills, or sore throat; red, swollen, blistered, or peeling skin; seizures; unusual bruising or bleeding; unusual tiredness; vision changes.
"Vision changes? Does that mean you can lose your sight?
Plus at no extra charge, you can lose bone density and sudden weight gain.
What!? Both!?
And here's my favorite (and I got this from the web site http://www.drugs.com/sfx/prevacid-side-effects.html) Bloody or black, tarry stools; change in the amount of urine produced.
All of which isn't too bad - especially if you go blind from taking the stuff that's causing all this other stuff to happen.
And just to reiterate: All the above is what could happen to you if you take some medicine to relieve your heartburn. Hey, I'm just going to burp and forget about it like my Grandparents did.
And I don't know what my Grandfather did to keep my Grandmother happy all those years they were together (there are certain things you don't talk about with your Grands, you know!) but I'm sure he wasn't taking those little blue pills that make that guy on TV so smiley and wavey.
Dude! If your pee-pee isn't working like you think it should maybe you should have a lower expectation of it instead of having a cab on stand-by in case that four hour thing happens.
Which gets me to the reason I'm having this little 'watch-out-what-you-wish-for-because-that-genie-in-the-bottle-is-way-smarter-than-you!' rant.
We've gotten so used to getting scared out of our wits that this whole May 21st End of The World Is Coming is getting very little notice. Not here in New York, anyway. We're kind of used to the End Of the World being just around the corner here in the Big City.
But why haven't any of the retail outlets and stores taken advantage of this wacky opportunity?
Can they not see a weekend one day sale for what it's worth?
May 21st is Saturday.
Go shopping!
It's your chance to save like there's no tomorrow!