Dear Other Than Me,

I’m going to make a point of spending a little time talking about advertising in this issue, since I’ve been neglecting what used to be the core subject matter of my meletter (aside from the topic of me, of course.) Part of the problem is that much of what I have to say about advertising these days centers around taglines, and I am now saying everything I have to say about taglines on my Tagline Jim glob, which you can find on my website, TaglineJim.com.
Okay, let’s see. I don’t want to talk about the Super Bowl commercials because it’s ancient history, and besides, what’s there to talk about? Absolutely nuthin’. Hunh. Good God.
Perhaps it’s time for me to address the dramatic upheaval in the world of advertising as a result of both viral media and social media.
Yawn.
How about this—It turns out Canada has advertising big brains just like we do. There’s one in particular that you really need to check out if you’re at all interested in advertising and its relationship to the wider culture. His name is Terry O’Reilly, and he has a weekly radio show on Canadian Public Radio called The Age of Persuasion. I believe he’ll have a book out soon with the same title. I’d give you a link to the archives for his show, but clicking on it won’t work since this is just a piece of paper —not a magical screen.
I just finished reading Googled by Ken Auletta. I was disappointed to find it a very balanced, thorough and thoughtful assessment of the company I so loathe. Absolutely crammed with unanswered questions about how the whole digital upheaval is going to come out.
What I learned from the book regarding Google’s vulnerabilities and potential root causes of their downfall or at least decline:
1. They are, at their core, engineers, incapable of factoring in the flaws, unpredictableness and unquantifiableness of humans. As a species we are not algorithmically reducible.
2. Hubris, with all its risks, is inevitable within such a large and ambitious enterprise;
3. Their naively optimistic, idealistic party line about not being evil, not being about making money and the like, will blow up as they confront the inevitable realities of being a huge company.
Some airline is assigning certain bathrooms on their planes for women only. The reason: men often leave the seat up. It’s time to come to grips with this perennial complaint. Here’s what I don’t get. How is it any more of an inconvenience for a woman to have to put the seat down than it is for a guy to have to put the seat up? Why doesn’t that airline designate certain bathrooms for men only, because women often leave the seat down? I hope someone out there can clear this up for me.
Interesting that, ten years after the Rush System for Health, or whatever they call themselves these days, adopted the tagline I wrote for them, Where World Class Medicine Revolves Around You, the North Shore University Health System has adopted precisely the positioning for which this tagline was designed. Unfortunately for Rush, they never followed through on this positioning when it was available to them. Unwisely, they eventually abandoned that tagline in favor of the vacuous What Healthcare Should Be, a copout tagline formula often used when the brand is at a loss to define itself. And, unfortunately, North Shore University Health System doesn’t have the medical fire power to support “world class medicine” as Rush can, so they have to settle for a less ambitious line, Excellence Is All Around You. Had I written that line, it would have been Excellence Is All About You, doubling the meaning of the last three words to allude to excellence not just being throughout the system, but also reinforcing that the excellence is patient-centric. But that’s just me. It’s a fine line, and the campaign it anchors works well.
I was flipping through the December issue of Science awhile back and ran across a delightful chemistry article entitled Regiodevergent Ring Opening of Chiral Aziridines, co-authored by Bin Wu, Jon R. Parquette and T.V. RajanBabu. I simply must share one quip by these guys: “Traditional enantioselective desymmetrizations of meso-epoxides and aziridines, as well as

kinetic resolutions of racemic epoxides have been established as highly useful processes for the synthesis of enantiopure intermediates.” Useful indeed, fellas!
Since I recently announced my availability as a speaker for any group who’d like to know why taglines are invaluable, what makes a good one and so forth, the lack of response has been stunning.
According to some Northwestern scientist, there’s a whole lot of water inside of rock. In fact, if he’s right, there’s more water stored inside of solid rock 250 miles below the earth’s surface than in all the oceans. Who knew?
In case you thought you watched The Who perform during half time at the Super Bowl, you’re sadly mistaken. The Who died in 1976 along with Keith Moon.
Get this. Working with one of my oldest and dearest clients, The Public Response Group and its formidable leader, Lloyd Betourney, we’ve created a vast body of advertising for their client, the local chapters of NECA/IBEW, (The Union of Safety and Expertise.), including an ongoing radio ad campaign featuring their faux spokesman, Shorty Circowitz, who is the antithesis of the highly qualified electricians represented by NECA/IBEW. Shorty offers “tips” for electrical safety at home, which, when demonstrated, usually end badly.
One of last year’s spots, entitled Fluffy, featured Shorty explaining how to discourage your cat from chewing on electrical cords. As you might imagine, Shorty’s cat, Fluffy, gets zapped at one point in the spot. Just for laughs, we included, at the end of the spot, a disclaimer: “No kitties were harmed in the making of this commercial.”
The first day this spot aired, one of our local radio stations got a complaint, or possibly two, expressing outrage that we harmed a cat. The radio station promptly panicked, and, against all reason, pulled the spot. Seriously.
Last week, Fluffy won “Best of Show”—first place in its category at the Pollie Awards, sponsored by the American Association of Political Consultants.
Meow.

Stoically,

Jim

Chairman Jimmy Says:
I’d like to teach the world to sing in
strepitosic dissonant heterophonic harmony.

“Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.” — George Bernard Shaw “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” — Albert Schweitzer “Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.” — George Santayana “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand him.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein “As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.” — John Dewey

Poe’s Law: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”

Harper’s Index® and Findings Digest
Number of U.S. university presidents who currently earn more than $1 million a year: 24
Number who did in 2002: 0
Boa, the last speaker of Bo, died.
Estimated amount that all U.S. banks charged their customers last year in overdraft fees: $38,000,000,000
Number of rare lizards that New Zealand customs officials found hidden in a German man’s underpants in December: 44
The universe was determined to be 30 times more entropic than previously thought.

February, 2010

Dear Other Than Me,

I indulged in so much thanking of people in the last meletter, I couldn’t squeeze this
item in, so it’s a little stale, but I feel this needs to be aired.
It’s about Taylor Swift. I’ve been hearing the name and seeing the occasional photo in this or that fluffy medium for quite some time. But I had never actually witnessed her in performance until the Country Music Awards in November, when she performed Forever and Always to open the show. I was impressed with her command of the stage at such a tender age. And the song was a pop tour de force.
But I couldn’t help noticing that Taylor wasn’t lip synching. She was actually “singing” live, an increasingly rare occurrence in “live” performance these days. I say “singing” because it was uncomfortably apparent that she can’t actually sing. She possesses an anemic, shaky, one dimensional voice and was relentlessly pitchy, to borrow the American Idol judges’ favorite word. (I’m told her recent performance at the Grammy’s was similarly horrible.)
At the CMA, no one seemed to care or even notice. And, in fact, Ms. Swift went on to win all four awards for which she was nominated. Of course, we’re talking about country music here, so singing ability is pretty much irrelevant. But the thing I found most baffling is how this song, Forever and Always, could possibly be classified as anything even remotely resembling a country song. It is, to my ears, pure, glorious, mainstream commercial pop, absent even the slightest tiny hint of twang or down home sentiment. No customary country instrumentation. Her voice didn’t crack once in that country singer way.
I’m aware that country hits have been crossing over into mainstream contexts quite frequently, but this song is so not country that not only should it occur exclusively in mainstream pop music contexts, but it should by all rights earn universal scorn from country music fans. WHATZ!?
Having spent my life deep in non-sequitorial America, Canada’s coastline is the longest of any country in the world—more that 150,000 miles long.
Cause and effect: The last time we had a census, what happened? The dotcom bubble burst, plunging us into a recession, and the terrorists blew up the Twin Towers. Beware, it’s census time again. If the Mayan calendar proves accurate, and the world ends in 2012, at least we’ll know what the proximate cause was.
Hey, I’ve decided to start posting these meletters in the “Stimulata” section of my communicaterer.com website. I will post each letter a month or two after it’s been sent via real mail, so you special people on my mailing list will still be the very first 200 people to read it, or, alternately, you’ll continue to get first shot at not reading it.
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t just skip the whole real mail thing, and simply send out the meletter as an enewsletter. I purge those clueless ingrates from my list.
If you promise not to tell my clients, I’ll tell you why it’s kind of crazy that I get paid to do what I do.
Most mornings, I drive to some benign environment with higher ceilings and bigger windows than my house has, and an aurally neutral background, not white noise, because the real world seldom provides pure white, but rather, white noise polluted with gray, pink, brown noise and globs of other less colorful noises, just enough stuff to create a discernible, generalized din. Most often this is my local BK or the food court down the road.
There, I eat some sort of breakfast, read the paper (while there still is one) and then begin work. First I pull out my legal pad and my laptop. Then I pop open my skull and pull out my brain, plop it onto the table and begin playing with it. Rolling it around, poking it, drumming on it and palpating it. This brings on feelings of pleasure and strain, angst and chuckles, all mixed together. As is true with most toys, you can only play with it for so long before you need to put it back and do something else. So I do. Then lunch. Then I repeat the morning’s work regimen. Then a nap, a snack (I’m on a peanuts-in-the-shell jag currently), and if needed, another little work session. At this point, my brain has been pummeled and prodded enough for one day, so I

put it away in that handy carrying case atop my neck, eat dinner and float in the glorious, amorphous fog of TV for the remainder of my waking day. Beats working, as I always say.

My 16 Favorite Movies of 2009
FUNNY In The Loop Invention of Lying The Hangover Pirate Radio Serious Man NOT FUNNY Art & Copy Bad Lieutenant The Hurt Locker The Merry Gentleman BOTH Adventureland An Education Away We Go Bandslam 500 Days of Summer Up In The Air Whip It WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR The Ugly Truth

Twilight pulled in $140,0000,000 its first weekend. That same week, Sarah Palin sold 700,000 books, someone paid $350,000 for Michael Jackson’s glove and Susan Boyle sold 701,000 cds the first week. Two months later, some technostravagnaza about a bunch of bluemans versus naughty businessmen topped $2 billion or some such obscene figure. Just thought you’d like a snapshot of America’s cultural priorities during the great recession of 2009.
Jay Ehret and I recently hosted an hour-long webinar on refreshing and renewing your brand, including your tagline. If you’re interested, and who wouldn’t be, you can find this webinar—FREE FREE FREE—right here: http://budurl.com/BUWebinar.
A week after the initial Haiti earthquake, after dozens of aftershocks had taken place, there was a 6.0 aftershock which was reported during the CBS early morning news show by Rob Elgas and Zoraida Sambolin. During the reporting of this aftershock, Rob asked the reporter on the scene what an aftershock was. Was it an earthquake? The reporter, seemingly unphased by the cluelessness of this question, confirmed that, yes Rob, an aftershock is in fact an earthquake. Both Rob and Zoraida seemed genuinely interested to learn this—oh, so an aftershock IS an earth quake. If I ran the news zoo at CBS, I would have fired Rob on the spot for being that ill-informed, a week into this story about 200,000 people dying from earthquakes and aftershocks.
Men of a Certain Age is one of the better shows on TV. In a recent episode, Ray Romano’s character spends a bachelor evening with a sort of Cro Magnon friend. They get to talking about life and all, and the friend, at one point, wonders whether we are victims of destiny or merely of the randomness of the universe. “Either way . . .” he casually concludes, “ in a hundred years . . .
all new people.” I’m thinking of adopting that thought as my new official philosophy of life. Since no one watches TV any more, I could probably attribute it to Chairman Jimmy and get away with it.
Oops. I forgot to talk about advertising again.

Stoically,

Jim

Chairman Jimmy Says:
When art and commerce get along, someone’s not doing their job.

Other People Says:
“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission.” — E.B. White “Historians and archeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.” — Marshall McLuhan “Correctness . . . is a schoolmarm’s hallucination.” — Clifton Fadiman “If a corporation has two executives who think alike, one of them is unnecessary.” — Ray Kroc “Nature is not cruel, only piteously indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.” — Richard Dawkins “A book is a machine for focusing attention; the internet is [a] machine for diffusing it.” — Marshall Poe

Harper’s Index and Findings Digest
Minimum amount the U.S. military has spent since 1985 on attempts to develop a missile shield: $150,000,000,000
Factor by which this exceeds spending on the Apollo moon landing and the Manhattan Project combined, adjusted for inflation: 5
Neuroscientists used lasers to inscribe bad memories on the brains of fruit flies
Rank of global warming among national priorities cited by Americans in January ’09 poll: 20
An engineer in Hertfordshire reported success in powering rockets with toffee.
Astronomers recommended that intelligent life be located by searching for CFC pollution

November, 2009

Dear Other Than Me,

HEY! I’ve launched my new brand. WooHoo. Please go to www.taglinejim.com. Then turn to the person on your left and demand that they do the same. Then email me with hearty congratulations. And then link to the site. Thanks.

I debuted my talk on the essentiality of a good tagline in November at the monthly counselor meeting of SCORE, a non-profit group of retired execs who counsel small businesses on all aspects of their business. It went swimmingly. If you think of some business group that might like to hear this entirely PowerPoint-free talk, give me a shout. It’s entertaining, I’m told.

While we’re on the subject of me (and when aren’t we?), email me if you wish to receive a copy of my recent Adweek column OR my recent Brandweek column, in case you’re too lazy to go to their websites and dig around for it there.

A couple months ago I had a medical procedure that precluded me from driving home from the hospital. So I called a cab. The cabbie, as it happened, was a stooped, hobbled 50-ish guy with the affect of an 80 year old. The first thing out of his mouth was “Mind if I go to the bathroom?” I was in no hurry, so I granted his request. He pulled into a parking spot and scurried, more or less, into the ER. As I sat there waiting, I wondered if this was, for this guy, a common occurrence. Did he ask this of every passenger he picked up in proximity of a public restroom?
The cabbie returned, contorted himself into his seat belt and started the meter. His radio was almost inaudible, but he seemed to recognize the tune that was playing. With vigor, he cranked the radio, which was now blasting Feeling Stronger Every Day, the old Chicago hit. Was there irony at work here? Did this song reflect his internal state? Or was he using it as an exhortation to himself to soldier on? Whichever the case, it made me feel better about my cabbie, and made the brief trip irrepressibly upbeat in a moldy oldie sort of way.

It’s high time I thanked a bunch of people who have aided, supported, contributed and enhanced my Communicaterer business, and more recently, the launch of Tagline Jim. Wife Geri, brother Don, Mike Salvatori, Marty O’Donnell, Dani Dudovick who so brilliantly created my original Communicaterer logo and corporate I.D. package; Wyatt Mitchell, who designed the original as well as the brand new and improved Communicaterer website; Bob Killian, Darch Clampitt, Linda Garland, Sharon Pittman, Amy Kowalczyk of Swayed Creative, Amy Shivvers of Crain’s Chicago Business, Teri Cavanagh of Cobb & Associates, DDB’s Marcia Iocabucci, PR maven Julie Baron, Jeff Durocher of RHR, Chris Sculles, Betsy Fiden, Ryan Carpenter, Kiley O’Brien and the entire cadre of McGuffin folks responsible for bringing the Tagline Jim brand to life by creating the logo, corporate identity package and website (www.taglinejim.com); The Marketing Spot Master Jay Ehret, who initially validated my inkling to create the new brand; all those of you who have provided me with jpgs, quicktimes, etc., Frank Grubich and the entire Maddock Douglas crew, especially Deanne DeVito; John Mennella, fellow tagliner Hubert Weinfurter, Tim Pressley of Status, and the 18 percent of you on my mailing list who shared your thoughts, opinions and suggestions regarding the name and the tagline.

Inevitably, this list will fail to recognize some people who should be recognized. I regret the slight in advance. Raise your hand and I’ll append the list in the next meletter.

Nils Christie, in an article in Wired, tells us that the U.S. locks up more citizens per capita than any other nation. So that’s something.

In a recent Sandals Resorts TV spot, the announcer says, “Isn’t it times like these that makes us . . . [blah blah blah].” He was reading from a script written by a professional writer of sorts, and in theory, was reviewed many times by, at a minimum, that writer’s boss, who likely is also a professional writer, along with some account guys and client folks. Oh, yeah, the art director read it too. In the old days, a proofreader might have had a shot at reviewing this script, but proofreaders have lately been deemed expendable by most agencies.

So how does such a blatant error survive this obstacle course? Is it that no one cares? Or that no one recognizes the error? Being a writer of sorts myself, I’m inclined to cut the writer of the script the most slack because he/she is so close to the script, and has imbedded the intended script in his/her brain so indelibly, he/she can become blind to the script as it actually exists. All he/she sees is the flawless script.

If this were a rare goof, I might not feel compelled to raise the issue. But the whole disagreement-of-number-between-subject-and-verb epidemic is so wildly out of control, I can’t help myself. While we’re reforming our educational system, let’s require that every student spend an entire year, say, fifth grade, studying plurals and singulars of at least some central verbs like to be, to do, to make and to go—all day, every day.

Just to prove that either I’m not dogmatically calcified about this issue, or else I talks out of both side of our mouth, I consider the paragraph two above this one to comprise a compelling argument NOT to insist on agreement of number between a singular noun subject and the possessive pronoun that refers back to that subject. I am ready to concede that “I’m inclined to cut the writer of the script the most slack because they’re so close to the script . . .” is preferable to the whole he/she, his/her thing.

Remember the day when we were able to preserve the singularity by always going with “he”? That day is gone, thanks to the stupid PC police.

In keeping with the earlier Thanksgiving theme, I’d like to convey my gratitude to good friend Marcia Fritz, her friend Rita Dragonette, and her friend, Greg Samata, whose thoughtful and generous spirit made it possible for me to attend the second annual Cusp Conference, organized by SamataMason. A two-day, mind-altering experience, eye-and-ear-popping, brain-massage demonstration that design truly is everything, or at least is in everything. Extraordinary musicians, Neo-Futurists, possible genius-to-keep-an-eye-on, Gong Szeto; resident IBM madman Dr. John Cohn, Lynda Barry (creator of Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and who, in her talk, echoed the exact same thought my daughter Holly uttered a month earlier: If I had a subconscious, I think I’d know about it.), and on and on. You seriously must attend CUSP next year.

I suppose I should close with some sort of mushy holiday sentiment.

Stoically,

Jim

Chairman Jimmy Says:
Common sense can be the ultimate hubris.

Other People Says:
“The lottery is a tax on the mathematically illiterate.” — Glen Whitney “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” — Daniel Pink “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it was used.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes “Keeping everlastingly at it brings success.” – Francis Wayland Ayer “The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” — George Bernard Shaw “To be skeptical all of the time about everything, based on nothing, is the worst kind of gullibility.” — Neil Steinberg

By the process of branding cytokinesis, I have formed a second one of me. I’ve named it Tagline Jim, and due to a mutation, it writes taglines exclusively (although it does experience an occasional brand name generating episode).

What is a brand? You can find out here, along with columns I wrote and even an interview with me. Hot dang.

I’ve written websites and videos like this one and this one and this one.