Holding Court

‘Tis the season and ‘tis the profession to look forward. To let old acquaintances be forgot along with technology that’s more than 15 minutes old and ideas that got 3 million hits on YouTube last month. Let’s face it, this time of year fits well with the mindset of our industry. One that’s driven by what’s just around the corner, whether it’s the next campaign, the next pitch or the next big thing. And I not only understand but embrace this mindset as, well, it completely mirrors my own.

I have a feeling advertising attracts people who have trouble standing still for a few minutes, much less getting satisfaction out of their accomplishments. But while I’m already spending a good 90 percent of my energy on what lies ahead in the first month of 2012, I am forcing myself to spend a moment to look back and think of all the cool stuff that took place in the last 12 months. And, no matter how foreign this idea is, I urge you to do the same.

For me, it was an exhausting year in many ways, but one of my most satisfying. With the help of my partners and the people in our company, I got to direct my first feature film around a concept that was dear to my heart at the start and close to all-consuming by the end. Then I got to watch that concept go from being a half-baked idea to something that was on the local news, to the lead story on Yahoo. More importantly, I got to bring all these incredible new people into my life as a result of the project including principal Jones, Satra Zurita, the head of the Compton school board and numerous civil servants, humanitarians and other ordinary folks like myself who were just looking for a little inspiration to create their own platform. I’ve always said our business is about the people, and I got to meet more good, smart, generous people in 2011 than any year I can remember.

I also got to learn about a hell of a lot of really interesting stuff. We tend to minimize this benefit of our job, but there was one moment last year where it became particularly apparent. I was driving back from an interview with one of the physician/scientists at our Cedars-Sinai client, when it suddenly hit me how amazing it is that I just got to listen to one of the leading cancer researchers speak for an hour about the potentially world-changing breakthroughs he and his team are making, and I didn’t even have to buy a $1,000-a-plate chicken dinner for the privilege. Honestly, without either having cancer or going to four years of med school to work at Cedars-Sinai, there’s no way I’m able to hear this story unless I’m in advertising and lucky enough to work on the Cedars-Sinai business. I also got to hang out with Clay Matthews, Serena Williams and Carmelo Anthony on an ESPN shoot, work with my partner, Tracy, on our first pitch together and eat some really good Lebanese food in Detroit. Finally, I got to learn all sorts of new technological wizardry like how to create an app that scrubs your Facebook page and turns it into a personalized song and how to use projection to turn an ordinary piece of glass into a touch screen, which my partners Scott and Kris at our digital company, United Future, actually created.

(Like airplanes, I still can’t fully understand how it can work without, um, magic being involved.)

As far as ideas went, this was probably my favorite of those we produced:

http://tinyurl.com/44txstv

Unfortunately, there were a bunch other really good ideas which came up somewhere short of actually getting produced for a variety of reasons that range from the garden variety to “the FBI just seized our Full Tilt Poker client’s business.”  But man, was it cool to be part of work for Conan, Epson and others that would have rocked the ad world had the ad world actually gotten the opportunity to seen them. In short, like most agencies these days, we’ve got some cleaning people who are super impressed with the comps they saw lying around our office in 2011.

I guess the point of all this, is that the best part of our business is that we get to learn a little about a lot of things, work with some really smart, creative and likable people and spend a good portion of each day trying to come up with stuff we think will delight and entertain others. So, no matter how many headaches you endured, disappointments you experienced and great ideas you had that met an untimely death, there have to be a few wonderful moments you experienced in 2011, specifically because you are in the ad business. So take a moment, breathe deep and reflect on them. Okay, time to go kick ass on 2012.

Image Credit

Here is the latest Crandall family holiday card installment in a tradition that started 19 years ago.

And here is the backup. By the way, those are Depends™ we’re rocking even though they look like my grandmother’s panties. Not that I’ve, you know, seen my grandmother’s panties.

Which card do you prefer?

I was going through some old work this week for one of our new pitches and I came across a spot I hadn’t watched in a while. It was for the California Department of Health Services anti-tobacco initiative. And it was inauspiciously named, “Bubbles 2.”

Of all the spots I’ve been part of, this is maybe the one that means the most to me.

Not because it was the best. Don’t get me wrong, I always liked the original spot, entitled, “Bubbles,” simply because it was the only positive anti-tobacco ad I’ve ever seen, much less been part of. Like most sequels, “Bubbles 2″ had a little more action. A few more locations. And a bigger ending. But that’s not what made it remarkable. What made it special, was the fact that it was written by my friend and art director, Shawn Brown. Without the use of his arms or legs.

On March 9, Agency Spy ran a piece announcing that I was undertaking a charity/documentary project called, “Free Throw.”  The comment in the thread below the article which had the most “likes,” (11) started with the words, “How utterly horrendous.” Four months later, on Monday, July 11, I appeared on CNN with one of the eight students in our event, capping a week of PR that included appearances on ESPN, Fox and the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s a personal account of what happened in between.

Those who have worked alongside me have seen the word I taped on my laptop years ago: “Positive.” I did this to help myself through moments of frustration and insecurity when I’m not writing particularly well. But I also did it because it’s probably the guiding principle of my creative life. Whether I’m producing my own work or leading the department, I always strive to focus on the positive and the upside, rather than dwelling on the obstacles and shortcomings of any situation. This is not due to any sort of morale principle. It’s simply because I believe cynicism and negativity, while often glorified in our business, are the death of creativity.

But that doesn’t mean the comments didn’t get to me. So, as I sat waiting for a client meeting to start in Orange County, I typed a message saying something to the effect of, “I understand your skepticism, but here’s what I’m trying to do, here’s why it’s not ultimately going to be about basketball, and here’s why I’m hoping you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt for just a few months before you publicly slam the idea and my motivation for developing it.” But each time, I erased the message, fearing any comment would just fuel the firestorm of negativity.

I live in a house where my 12-year-old fixes my computer, my 15-year-old tells me which songs to put on my iPod and my wife regularly tells me to turn on the Red Sox game in my office so she can watch “Gossip Girl” in the bedroom.

More than any time in history, we have become a culture driven by youth. It’s relatively easy to see why this has happened. Between technology advancing at an exponential rate and trends lasting about as long as one of Rihanna’s hairstyles, it’s no surprise that young people who are more open to change, better able to adapt to new technology, and at the most social point of their lives, would play an increasingly important role in our world.

We all know what we’ve gained from this evolution.

But what have we lost?

It started out as a personal project that became an agency project that became a shared mission. We raised $75,000 in scholarship money and just as importantly, gave a group of kids, teachers and parents the chance to show there’s a lot more to people from Compton than you’ll ever learn in a rap song.

In two weeks, I filled my heart with some of the best stories of my life. I’d tell you all about them, but, heck, I have to save something for the movie.

So, in the meantime, I’ll let someone else do the talking …

More “Free Throw” –
- Article in the Daily Breeze
- Official “Free Throw” Facebook Page
- Official “Free Throw” Twitter Account

Creatively, I’ve been lucky. In addition to my near misses, crushing disappointments and abject failures — of which there have been many — I’ve been fortunate enough to see two screenplays I wrote turn into movies, my children’s book published by Random House and a TV pilot purchased and subsequently killed by ABC. I’ve had the opportunity to work with my favorite athletes for ESPN, launch Michael Jordan’s cologne and walk the red carpet at the Kodak Theater for my own premiere. But of all the creative projects I’ve completed, none are as important or as satisfying as the one I’m about to begin.

Just over a year ago, I came to the conclusion that despite the proliferation of the Internet, the accessibility of air travel and the global nature of business, we still live in a world with a million lines that divide us as people. Some of these lines are physical — lines formed by the borders of neighborhoods, towns and countries. Others, like the lines caused by race, money and politics are less immediately apparent, but no less real.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist: Roswell, black helicopters, the JFK assassination. Not really buying into it, until yesterday, when I exposed the grand daddy of them all — The Supercuts Cover Up. To understand the significance of what I revealed, you must go back a ways … to my birth. Unlike the other babies in the maternity ward, it quickly became apparent to my parents, and most of the hospital staff, that I was born with pubic hair on my head. It was a curse I would take with me through my teenage years. As other kids were parting their hair in the middle, growing Aerosmith-like locks and generally spending a lot of time shampooing and conditioning, I was having my wirey white ‘fro shaped like a set of hedges. It started with the Chia Pet rounded ball on top of my head, transitioned to the modified Gumby where I tried to part it, causing the hair to incline from left to right at a 45 degree angle, and eventually resolved itself in the straight-back let’s just keep it military-short and hope no one asks me if I’m still in basic.

Now, while I equate this ridiculously kinky and unwieldy hair with Saturdays watching “Love Boat” — instead of making out with hot Boston chicks in acid washed jeans in front of White Hen Pantry like my buddies were — it has been liberating as an adult. Why? Because I now realize that it doesn’t matter who cuts my hair — you really can’t screw it up. OK, you can, but it’s kind of like buying a house for $16,000 — there’s only so much downside. Armed with this knowledge that no matter what you do to it (my hair will always be in the D+/C- range), I have chosen not to pay men named Shane or Renaldo to cut my hair in favor of women with nametags that say things like, “Claire,” “Sante” and “Lewanda.”

Like any good creative person, somewhere in my early twenties, I read “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. As most of you probably know, the novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, believes that all architecture and design should flow naturally from an object’s central purpose. In other words, form follows function.

Unfortunately, this discipline seems to have been completely lost in the modern world, where most products are designed first and foremost to look cool rather than to actually serve a purpose. There are lots of people I could blame for this. I chose Ashton Kutcher. No, not for his crap movies, but because the same stupidity that turned his mesh trucker cap into a mandatory fashion accessory has now influenced almost everything we touch. There doesn’t have to be logic, practicality or taste applied to a product so long as it plays to the vanity of some empty notion of hip.

This is probably the longest running campaign I’ve ever been a part of. It started just after my wife, Denise, and I got married in 1992. I had been in California for two years and wanted a way to punk my friends back in Boston. So, for our first Christmas together, we sent out a holiday card that showed us rollerblading our tree home. (Something we actually did by the way, because I was driving a, um, Miata. Trust me, it was super cool back then. Super.)

As we got older, life graciously provided us with a number of props: A new house, two children, a cat, a dog and a fake nanny to name a few. Sometimes these accessories worked. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they needed to use the litter box in the middle of the shoot. Regardless, there have always been plenty of stories that went along with the shooting of the annual Christmas card. Most of which involve one or both boys misbehaving, my wife getting frustrated to the point of tears and all of us riding home in silence. Typically, to some song on the car radio like “We are Family” that accentuated what a disappointment we are as a family unit.