James P. Othmer

Washington Post Book World: "HOLY WATER walks perfect line between satire and compassion."

2010-06-19T04:49:00.000-07:00

James P. Othmer's comic novel "Holy Water,"

By Elinor Lipman
Sunday, June 20, 2010

HOLY WATER
By James P. Othmer
Doubleday
292 pp. $26.95

The hero of James P. Othmer's second novel, "Holy Water," is -- luckily for us -- living a middle-management life that has added up only to "the conscientious fulfillment of limited expectations." At 32, Henry Tuhoe has a résumé that traces his lateral moves and promotions from Oral Care to Non-headache-related Pain Relief to Laxatives to Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings and finally to vice president of the Underarm Division.

With the closing of "Armpits" -- one of the few places where the author's cleverness calls attention to itself -- corporate "rightsizing" coincides with the break-up of Henry's unhappy marriage to the unreasonable Rachel, who has forced him into a vasectomy. Or has she? This medical and marital mystery is where Henry first wins our sympathy and recruits us for his adventures. Not that he has a choice, but will his transfer be, as his boss characterizes it, "a chance to start over, an opportunity to lose his inherent wussiness"?

As with the author's acclaimed first novel, "The Futurist," "Holy Water" manages to be at the same time cynical and soul-searching, a difficult juggling act better served in some chapters than others. Henry must decide: Lose his job or be corporately exiled to the fictional third world Kingdom of Galado on the India-China border? There he will open a call center for Happy Mountain Springs bottled water, a sainted brand. Henry doesn't find out until he arrives that the citizens of the "unhinged monarchy" of Galado have no drinking water, that plastic bottles are outlawed, and that all the country's streams are toxic. But his corporate ennui turns into a personal humanitarian mission -- Clean water for all! -- fueled by love and eyes finally opened to the world outside himself. Alas, danger threatens and encroaches. "You have to know all the wrong people to get anything done in this country," he quickly learns.

His new home has a prince who is crazy to just the right megalomaniacal and comic degree. As a graduate of Northeastern, he speaks excellent English. Wearing Lycra workout tights while his iPod plays "High School Musical," he tells Henry, "I have decided to bypass governments and political diplomacy in favor of corporate diplomacy." As illiteracy, starvation and illness flourish, the prince dreams of office towers, banks, hotels, brand-name luxury boutiques and a 28-theater cineplex. His citizens, he asserts, despite demonstrations and uprisings to the contrary, do not want a democracy.

Though a layer of guy humor rests none too lightly on the first few chapters, we would miss larger-than-life Meredith, Henry's administrative assistant by day and an online nudist by night (her site, by subscription only: EEEEVA EEEENORMOUS and her 46EEEE Twins). Henry's secret voyeurism and respect for her multifold talents add a rewarding touchstone to the plot. No one-note porn star, the highly intelligent Meredith devours the National Review, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Back at headquarters, via e-mail, strictly business, she helps Henry in his mission to supply fresh water to the parched and needy citizens of Galado.

The call center, despite daily training sessions, is never quite up and running: No employees speak English, and Henry is mightily distracted by the political realities of Galado, by his conscience and by Maya, a native and his second in command.

"You don't want to be here, do you?" she asks Henry on his first day. He replies sarcastically: "In a tiny village in the middle of nowhere teaching workers from a drought-plagued region how to talk about crystal-clear water that comes in a container that, incidentally, is forbidden here?"

In "The Futurist" Othmer demonstrated a terrific eye for the absurd, for deflating the big, the pompous, the entitled. Sly sentence by sly sentence, "Holy Water" similarly does not have a wasted word. Once he gets Henry out of Manhattan and into Galado, the author walks a perfect line between satire and compassion. Less satisfying are the ambitious plot turns, in which Henry's altruism goes a little action-adventure. There is a lane switch in the last few chapters, not just into darker comedy but into a more solemnly muckraking tone. Momentum doesn't offer an easy glide to the finish. As Maya tells Henry, "You use your humor and your cynicism to protect what is essentially smothered idealism." The same could be said for the hand that spins this often brilliant, always caustic corporate satire.

Is the marketplace asking authors to James-Bond-up their plots? Might some readers wish Henry had stayed in suburban New York, commuting to Manhattan, Cheever meets Vonnegut, having faith in the domestic over global ambitions? We look forward to that down-size. Othmer is a smart, elegant, witty writer who could do small beautifully.

Elinor Lipman's ninth novel, "The Family Man," is now in paperback.

800-CEO-READ is a friend of HOLY WATER

2010-06-19T04:31:00.000-07:00

Not sure if this is a first, but it's rare that a company such as 800-CEO-READ, which works with the world's best non-fiction business books and authors, highlights a novel. But they've been kind enough to discuss HOLY WATER on their blog, and run an excerpt from the novel's prologue, which is reprinted below.

June 17, 2010
800-CEO-READ
Daily Blog: Holy Water

Like great fiction, good advertising tells a story. It creates an alternate reality we want to enter. So when an ad man like James P. Othmer writes fiction, he does so with a practiced skill set. You may know Othmer from his brilliant book on advertising from a year ago, Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, which was named one of Fast Company’s Best Business Books of the Year and just came out in paperback. His new book, Holy Water, was released this week, and is his second novel (his first, The Futurist, was released in 1996).

When Chris Brogan visited our offices and saw the books scattered everywhere, he asked if we ever tire of reading all the business books that come through the office. My answer to him, and to the problem in general, is to read fiction at home. It’s always a pleasure to have those two worlds meet, when an author you like works successfully in both genres. And with the darkly comic and satirical Holy Water, Othmer has returned to fiction flawlessly, making me a very happy reader.

If you liked Adland, I’m sure you’ll like Othmer’s fiction. He was kind enough to share a sample with us. The following excerpt, the book’s introduction, sets the scene.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Riverfire

The river is burning down.

Or is it up? The river is burning up. More than a hundred feet up. And since his boat is upwind from the night-burning pit furnaces to the south and stars are shining defiantly in a sky that rarely allows them to and the white-tipped lesser Himalayas loom on either side of the valley to the east and west, he thinks that this is a disturbingly beautiful thing. This riverfire.

They didn’t tell him about this phenomenon at the executive briefing in Manhattan. The exit interview at the home office. Nowhere in the Winning Business Abroad Six Sigma Powerpoint presentation does he recall hearing anything about a body of water consumed by flame.

All they told him was, In this economy, be thankful you have a freakin’ job.

His groin aches. The epicenter of phantom pains. The karmic vortex. The fleshy receptacle of damaged memories. Formerly known as his testicles.

The fire is highest where debris collects in the crooked river’s bend.

He is a big believer in the symbolic weight of what song is playing at a particular moment. And if a song isn’t playing, he will assign a song to the moment and force the symbolism, revel in the false epiphany. His suggested soundtrack for this moment would be Spoon’s “The Beast and the Dragon Adored”.

“That’s beautiful. Is it some kind of welcome ceremony organized by the villagers?” he asks, even though he knows that this isn’t some kind of welcome ceremony organized by the villagers. He knows that the river up here was coated with a black skin of waste that was waiting to burn. Daring someone to light the match.

Like what? The Cuyahoga. Near Cleveland in 1969. He is too young to remember the actual fire but not too young to get his history from REM’s “Cuyahoga”.

This is where we walked, this is where we swam. . .

“It is not a ceremony,” explains his corporate liaison/host/executioner. “It is toxic, this river.” The man waves at the flaming water, as if it is a hyperkinetic child. “Sometimes it does that.”

Henry and the corporate liaison exchange a glance that signals a transition in their relationship. The end of bullshit. Previously the liaison had told him that a pro-democracy demonstration in the capital city was a birthday celebration for the King, that the black ash that fell like nightmare snow on Shangri-La Square was volcanic and that his country was a human rights champion despite the fact that it still hasn’t abolished slavery.

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up. . .

He sees this as a bad thing, this sudden telling of the truth. He decides that the end of bullshit means they no longer care what he thinks. His hosts. His corporate partners. The diminished bureaucrats of a fading monarchy. Because someone to whom they have decided to tell the truth is obviously someone who no longer matters. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the Madison Avenue PR exec brought in to work the same spin magic her firm did for the Beijing games staring at her out of service iPhone and quietly weeping.
He decides to give the corporate liaison another chance to lie. To help matters, he even spells out the premise of the lie for him. “Maybe there was, you know, an accident. A tanker spill or a factory mishap. Perhaps the Chinese…”

The liaison shakes his head, lights an American cigarette. “No,” he answers. “Even rivers burn. This one… toxic, 24/7.”

Cuyahoga gone. . .

No one told him about any of this. No one told him about the corruption, the poverty, the malaprop billboard in the half-built “Free Zone” touting “Quality Manufactured Gods”. No one told him that the non-party constitutional democracy to which he was being extra-sourced was actually an unhinged monarchy which is, when the U.N. and Amnesty International aren’t looking, a dictatorship. No one told him about the delusional, profit and Bollywood-obsessed-despot in waiting. And no one told him that his five-star “spiritual eco lodge” with a private bathing garden, infinity pool and extensive spa menu was also a whorehouse that sat on a hilltop less than a mile from water-challenged village with one occasionally working pump that tapped into an aquifer of the most polluted and, as it turns out, flammable river on the planet.

Which would have been nice, since he works for a recently purchased subsidiary of an American held bottled water company whose mission statement, printed on the cover of its stunningly produced annual report, is “Bringing fresh water to a thirsty world.”

No one told him. But then again, it’s not like he’d asked a whole lot of questions.

“What do you put it out with?” Henry asks. The liaison doesn’t answer. He just watches the flames.

But the front man from the yet to be dispatched U.S. Congressional delegation, a young Republican who had vomited over the side of the boat less than ten minutes ago, does have an answer. “You put it out with truth,” he says. “And courage.”

This elicits laughter from the in-country deal maker for the biggest brand at the gates, the Wal-Mart delegation, which is just waiting for the proverbial green light. The wink and nod from the Palace. He removes the stem of a silver hashish pipe from his lips that had been passed to him by an Australian corporate mercenary. “Courage? My God, son. Don’t start going all John McCain on us now.”

Randy Newman had a Cuyahoga song, too. “Burn on, Big River”

He squirts a glob of Purel into his left palm and rubs as if it can kill nightmares and coup d’etats as well as 99.9 percent of most common germs.

Before he left New York he did the most perfunctory of searches. Google. Lonely Planet. An old atlas. It’s all he had time for, considering what he left, how fast it all happened. His old boss called it a chance to start over, opportunity to lose his inherent wussiness. His new boss, whom he is yet to meet, called it, via email, History waiting to happen, the next Bangalore. Wikipedia called it, “a secret and mysterious kingdom, long isolated from international politics and commerce.”

“Wow, what a shit-hole,” he hears the Wal-Mart guy say as they skirt east of the fire and drift past a shoreline village. Women with buckets are wading into those sections of the water that are not burning. Children are running along the river’s edge, keeping pace with the slow-moving boat.

He’s not sure where they’re taking him. Either to a party in his honor, he thinks, or to kill him, to preserve what’s left of theirs.
His soon to be ex-wife called it the perfect place for him to suffer the slow and painful death he deserves.
The woman with whom he thought he was falling in love called it something, too, but he can’t be sure because she said it in a language he doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t know and no one told him anything.

Yet here he is. A newly made VP of Global Water, Investor Relations, for a company whose headquarters he’s never seen, whose founders he just met and one of whom is huddled somewhere in the hold of this boat, on a burning river in a country he didn’t know existed three months ago.

As they reverse engines and slow alongside a floating dock at the far end of the village that his suspiciously beaming host had just called a shit-hole, he looks at the people gathering to meet them, to throw them a line, their faces aglow with hope and reflected riverfire.

Or is that hate instead of hope?

He listens for the symbolic song to accompany the moment. Perhaps a chant supplied by the locals or faint notes from a far-off boom box. Then, hearing only the wailing of strangers, he attempts to assign one. But this moment needs more than one song, he decides. It needs a soundtrack. A playlist.

A Mixtape for the Apocalypse.

HOLY WATER available everywhere June 15

2010-06-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Good stuff coming this summer. In addition to local appearances and media on behalf of HOLY WATER, I just found out that at the end of August I'll be heading to Australia (with family) for two weeks of media and writers conferences and retreats. Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast and Brisbane. Thanks to my enthusiastic and brilliant new AUS/NZ publisher for HOLY WATER and ADLAND, UWA.

More to come soon, including, I'm hoping, some great news regarding the development of a major motion picture adaptation of THE FUTURIST.

ADLAND out in paperback today!

2010-06-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

The Vintage/Anchor trade paperback edition of ADLAND is now available wherever books are sold. Amazon has a nice discounted special for anyone who orders ADLAND together with my new novel HOLY WATER, coming from Doubleday on June 15.

Fast Company on HOLY WATER: "Beach read for BlackBerry addicts."

2010-05-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

"Nothing in the corporate world should shock anyone anymore. Whatever you think will happen won't, and whatever you think doesn't have a chance will sneak up and kick you in the ass." That's Henry Tuhoe's philosophy, and he's our knowing protagonist through this dark screwball business comedy by James P. Othmer. The action starts when a conglomerate transfers Tuhoe from marketing deodorant to setting up a call center for a bottled-water brand in a Himalayan country that has little potable H2O. As Tuhoe evolves from goofball to grown-up, Othmer, a former ad creative, keeps the action humming with satirical riffs on corporate trainers, figurehead founders, and how business really gets done in a developing nation. The book's gooey center inside its hard-candy shell is about finding meaning in work and life, and after all the high jinks in this beach read for BlackBerry addicts, Othmer has earned it. -- DL

FROM THE DAILY BEAST: "I'm Tiger's Sex Addiction Counselor, and I approved this ad."

2010-04-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

by James P. Othmer

The latest from Nike and Tiger Woods, dropped into rotation on ESPN and the Golf Channel just in time for his ballyhooed return to golf at the Masters, is not an ad. It’s a provocation. A collaboration between a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, a man who just got out of sex rehab and the voice of a dead man who, when he prowled amongst the living, probably could have used a bit of counseling if not rehab himself.

In a way, I can see why Nike would make it. It automatically puts the brand front and center in a national conversation on the eve of one of sport’s most prestigious events. Provocations are gold for brands, and there is no doubt that Tiger Woods is a brand. But why would Tiger Woods the wanna-be human green-light it? Why would he choose to let us know the inner workings of his troubled soul via a :30 second piece communications that at best is branding and at worst is insensitive propaganda?

Tiger likes to perpetuate the myth of Earl Woods almost as much as his own, but this commercial, which many have already called poignant and moving, isn’t just odd, it’s creepy.

The raw and purposely under-produced sound quality gives Earl Woods’s voiceover a sort of Rod Serling from the grave to your conscience feel. Team Nike/Tiger could have cleaned this up but I imagine the conversation in the edit involved a lot of talk about “authenticity”. What would a dead man’s words sound like? What does remorse look like (“shut up and look at the camera”). Should posthumous parental disgust sound crisp and polished or distressed and analog, like a sound artifact recovered from Edison’s workshop.

Then there are the words. “Did you learn anything?” asks Otherworldly Earl, the man who made Tiger in every sense of the word, and with whom Tiger still has issues that he has curiously chosen to work out through a commercial. "Tiger, I wanna find out what your thinking was. I wanna find out what your feelings are, and, did you learn anything." Well, yeah. So does everyone from Perez Hilton and TMZ to Katy Couric and the million other media outlets lurking outside the gates of Augusta, each of whom would love to have a heart-to-heart with him. By going there, by teasing and provoking us, Nike and Tiger are both brilliant and contemptible.

This is why I hate this ad. And why I can’t stop watching it.

Should “Subconsciously Spanked by Earl” be the lead track on the Nike-produced mix-tape labeled “Tiger’s Redemption”? Should Tiger still be listening to the guy who had him swinging a club in front of a TV camera when he was three, or on the TV show “That’s Incredible!” when he was five? Should he be still be getting love and life guidance from the ghost of a twice married man who has shocked and disappointed him with his own marital indiscretions?

The first thing I thought when I watched this spot is, What if, instead of Earl, Elin Woods was given an opportunity to lay down her own version of a voice track for this ad. Now that would be authentic. Even if she said the same words, but with a slightly different inflection: HAVE YOU LEARNED ANYTHING, TIGER?! I imagine re-mixed parody versions of this very concept are being downloaded for public consumption right now.

Despite the fact that he was by then a 33-year-old man, Tiger was still listening to Earl that night in Orlando, when he hit or was hit by all kinds of things, from fire hydrants to the realization that the non-stop booty call was over, to the effects of the prescription drug Ambien. A believable version of the story has him impaired that night because he was, if fact, taking Ambien—which Tiger began taking when Earl was dying.

So, even at 33, it’s still all about Daddy for Tiger. Which is why this is such a strange and troubling choice for Nike, and especially for Tiger. The question for Nike is, Does a swoosh-crazy public really want to see its hero on the brink being repeatedly spanked, this time by his Daddy? Or do they want him to shut up and play golf, and let us go back to re-mixing the Tiger narrative on our own terms? Nike claims the commercial (which it thoughtfully only “aired” until 4pm Wednesday but will of course live forever on YouTube) is a show of support for Tiger. But at a certain point the accumulation of mea culpas and serial chastisement takes on the stench of James Frey on Oprah. And last I checked, Frey didn’t have a footwear and apparel deal.

For human-not-brand Tiger and his family, the questions are more complicated. Perhaps it would have made more sense if, a la political ads, this latest from Nike ended with a legal voiceover that said, “I’m Tiger Woods’ Sex Addiction Therapist, and I approved this ad.”

James P. Othmer is the author of ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet and the novel THE FUTURIST.

From the Daily Beast: Don Draper Takes on Health Care

2010-03-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

by James P. Othmer

President Obama is about to undertake the most daunting branding challenge in recent history: Sell skeptical America on a plan that doesn’t kick in until 2014. Former advertising executive James P. Othmer gives Obamacare a Madison Avenue makeover.

Obama is not a brand. Just ask Desiree Rogers, the former White House social secretary who made the mistake last spring of equating the president of the United States with the tagline for the soft drink Snapple when she told WSJ magazine, "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand.” Now, she’s looking for work.

Similarly, health-care reform is not a product. Just ask the dozens of corporations, industry coalitions, and political organizations on both sides of the issue who have thrown tens of millions of dollars into TV ads, and who will start it all over again today, with fresh campaigns to sell or un-sell the unbranded non-product that is health-care reform.

The Brand Obama that I want to see moving forward is the one too busy fixing things to stop to talk to the likes of me.

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that presidents do continue to be a brands even after elections, and that their policies are the products upon which their equity is built and that in the case of health-care reform, the real selling has only just begun.

In advertising parlance, the product (health-care reform) is pretty much the same, but now the brief (how to sell it) has significantly changed. Sunday, Obama was selling something to consumers who had a choice. Today, he is selling the justification of a product that, like it or not, will be a part of every American’s life. And he’s selling it to a demographic filled with a Toyota-esque anger and cynicism and a deepening sense that neither side is telling anything near the truth.

In a product brief, the first question often posed by an agency to its client is, Why are you advertising? The most recent and frequent answer to this hypothetical question from Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod seems to be along the lines of “To demystify and clearly explain the legislation, especially for the enraged half of the population that wants nothing to do with it.” It’s a valid enough intent, but one has to wonder how they can have more success, post-legislation, enlightening a jaded, cynical audience about an issue it can no longer influence. Early reports mention the likelihood of a talking points campaign that will attempt to break down in 30-second spots that which could not be sufficiently explained by either side for more than a year. Good luck with that.

Indeed, at 2,700 pages, with an additional 153 pages of last-minute changes, this is a product that seems to defy advertising and, if anything, seems designed to confuse. Instead, for a public that basically wants to know, How will this effect me?, what’s needed isn’t so much an ad but some kind of James Cameron-invented, alternate-reality avatar module that will immerse consumers onto the planet Healthora, where every one of us will play the role of Jake Sully and our health care future will finally, magically, make sense, down to the last penny on our monthly premium.

Often, an agency will look to case histories of similar products and marketplaces for lessons learned before determining a course of action, and it’s been reported that the Obama administration has been studying the public’s reception to President Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid reform of 1965. Again, not a bad thought, but the circumstances surrounding the two bills are vastly different. Johnson announced his intentions for reform as part of his vision for a “Great Society” during his State of the Union Address in February 1965. It was passed by the end of July by a margin of 307-116 in the House and 70-24 in the Senate. Not one Republican voted for the Obama legislation. Also, in a nice piece of branding, I mean statesmanship, Johnson signed his bill in Independence, Missouri, and enrolled none other than Harry S Truman and Bess Truman as the first card-carrying Medicare beneficiaries.

While some may realize immediate benefits from Obama’s program, the vast majority of the population won’t see results, positive or negative, until enrollment commences sometime in 2014. For an instant-gratification world quick to judge, this is a long time to keep the populace informed, engaged, and satisfied, especially compared to the fact that two months after Johnson’s legislation passed, more than 1 million Medicare patients had already been admitted to hospitals. Increasingly in adland the concept of a campaign, or a fixed period of time during which an advertising message is broadcast, is becoming obsolete. In a 24/7 media cycle during which consumers can pick and choose when and where they want to engage with content, it’s important to keep the dialogue going, but not to inundate.

My advice to the president: Do the heavy lifting behind the scenes and keep your message in, and your face out of, the next waves of ads. Over the last year we’ve all kind of seen too much process, from the town halls to the Tea Parties to the back slapping and hand shaking taking place on the Senate floor Sunday night between people who had spent the day calling each other baby killers and racists. Transparency in branding and in politics is a good thing in 2010. Ubiquity, not so much.

The Brand Obama that I want to see moving forward is the one too busy fixing things to stop to talk to the likes of me. When the bill is handed to you act like you’ve been there before and will soon be there again. For instance, don’t Tweet: “In your face, Rush! #HR 3590.” Do tell will.i.am thanks, but there’s no need for a celebratory health-care song on YouTube. In fact, given the public mood, it might be a good idea to go as far as to somehow "misplace" your NCAA pool (especially if you have Cornell making the Sweet 16). To win again would only be construed as an act of unconscionable hubris.

Finally, regarding the signing: At all costs, avoid using the words Mission and Accomplished; avoid giving any speeches on aircraft carrier decks or standing on top of a hospital gurney in full surgical scrubs. In fact, rather than travel to Independence, Missouri, or to some medical facility where someone is receiving the first token benefit, stay back at the office. Take a few minutes from your incredibly busy day spent fixing Iraq and Afghanistan and the economy and helping people who’d be a lot less likely to be sick in the first place if they had jobs, and put pen to paper. Sure, let someone film it. It might make for a nice ad in 2012. Then get back to work.

James P. Othmer is the author of ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet and the novel The Futurist.

In LA, building sides have become giant refrigerators upon which studios display the mediocre art of their needy children.

2010-03-19T10:38:00.001-07:00

The Art of Marketing Conference in Toronto

2010-02-24T08:19:00.000-08:00

I'm getting ready to join some great speakers at The Art of Marketing Conference in Toronto on March 2. I'm scheduled to talk about branding and creativity, but I'll also be test driving the insights behind my non-fiction book in progress about the future of entertainment and branding.

Here are the details from the producers:

theartofmarketing.ca

About The Art of Marketing Conference
This one day conference features six internationally renowned bestselling authors and leaders who will share an exciting blend of cutting edge thinking and real world experience on today’s most critical marketing issues. Don’t miss out on your chance to be a part of history and network with over 1,200 of Canada’s most influential marketers.

Why are we doing this?
Developed to answer the questions currently facing your organization The Art of Marketing will provide a clearer understanding of how marketing has changed, what role it now plays in the buying decision, its impact on your business and ultimately how the consumer views, interacts and positions your brand in a crowded marketplace.

When?
Tuesday March 2nd, 2010
9:00AM – 5:00PM

Where?
NOTE: Due to an overwhelming response we've moved the conference to a larger room...

Metro Toronto Convention Centre
South Building - Hall G
222 Bremner Blvd.
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3L9
t. 416-585-8000
w. mtccc.com

Who Should Attend?
Marketing is an integral part of every company, from a local start-up to a multi-national brand it’s the driving force between your products and your customers. As such the forum is attended by a wide variety of leaders from across the industry from agency to client to media our delegates include…

Account Executives
Advertising Coordinators
Advertising Managers
Advertising Directors
Art / Creative Directors
Brand Managers
Category Managers
Communications Co-ordinators
Communications Managers
Consultants
Digital Marketers
Direct Marketers
Directors of Marketing
Events Coordinators
Marketing Analysts
Marketing Assistants
Marketing Coordinators
Marketing Managers
Marketing Representatives
Media Relations / Publicists
Online Marketers
Product Managers
Vice Presidents, Business Dev.
Vice-Presidents, Marketing

Who’s Behind This?
The Art of Productions Inc. designs and produces a collection of world class live events. Each event educates and entertains audiences from communities of interest by bringing together leading authorities and internationally renowned presenters. “The Art of…” programs are learning experiences where participants gain key concepts that can be applied to their professional and personal lives. Engaging and informative programming guarantees an educational and empowering experience.

"The nuttiest thing you'll ever read." -- New York Times

2010-02-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

Recently, Lift Trucks Project, a new gallery space in Croton Falls asked me to participate in a program in which writers choose a piece of art from a tremendous international selection, and comment upon it. I was immediately drawn to a trio of sculptures by the German artist Ottmar Horl. Who could resist lime green garden gnomes flipping the bird? A bit of research revealed that Horl had gained international renown and had almost been arrested in Germany for a similar display featuring a small army of gnomes giving the Sieg Heil! salute in a park in a Munich suburb -- a definite illegal no-no in post Hitler Germany. This got me thinking about what Hitler would think of Horl's work. Today the Times reviewed the exhibit, and called my short essay, which was written to be read in public with a flawed German accent, "the nuttiest thing you'll ever read." I take this as a compliment, though I've read much nuttier.

The Ghosts of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels on Ottmar Horl’s Gnomes Flipping the Bird
(translated, via medium, by James P. Othmer)

ADOLF HITLER’S GHOST (AHG): Hey, Joe, check out these spunky little green dudes.
JOSEPH GOEBBEL’S GHOST (JBG): They are garden gnomes, Mein Fuhrer.
AHG: Really? It’s too bad that they are so little, and of an unnatural, impure color, and not, you know, white or in any way master race potential, because I must say, I like their feisty spirit.
JGG: They are inanimate, Mein Fuhrer.
AHG: Inanimate? Was…was that our doing? Were the gnomes, or for that matter, all little or green people part of…
JGG: No, Mein Fuhrer. Somehow the garden gnomes escaped our scrutiny.
AHG: Good. Because, animate or not, you have to admire the audacious hand salute. Did you know, Joey G., that when we made the whole stiff-armed Heil! the mandatory greeting back in ’23, this…this flipping of the bird was the runner up. Hess was a huge fan of the middle finger salute. Makes me wonder if things would have turned out differently if we’d have run with it.
JGG: The thing about these gnomes, Mein Fuhrer, they are works of modern art. Sculpture.
AHG: Art? Did you know, Jo-Go, that I was something of an artist back in the day?
JGG: Yes, you have mentioned this once or twice in the past 88 years, Mein Fuhrer. In fact, your acrylic on canvas “Rotweilers Playing Poker With Jew” hung over my room in the bunker right up until, until I murdered my family and committed suicide. Not to imply that there was any connection between the two, Mein Fuhrer.
AHG: I’ve always said that in addition to being a master propagandist, Joltin’ Joe Goebbels was a man of impeccable taste.
JGG: Thank you. If I may, the artist who created this is the same man who recently created quite the stir when he placed an army of 1,250 tiny gnomes raising their arms in our – make that your – salute, right in the center the Munich suburb of Straubing.
AHG: I knew that I saw something special in his work!
JGG: There was an outcry, because, as you know, anyone who is caught giving a Nazi salute in modern Germany can be subjected to a three-year jail term.
AHG: They threw 1,250 gnomes in jail?
JGG: No, Mein Fuhrer. The law applies specifically to humans. They wanted to prosecute the artist, Ottmar Horl, for displaying Nazi symbols in public.
AHG: So then, this Herr Horl, he is a hero! A born-again Nazi!
JGG: No, Mein Fuhrer. He is an artist. He claims that the gnomes were merely a provocation. A work of satire.
AHG: Satire? I don’t understand.
JGG: It’s kind of like irony. Do you remember our discussion about irony after we first got here and during orientation they told us that, among other things, we’d be eating gefilte fish three times a day for eternity?
AHG: Anyway, I wonder if Horl knows that this was the runner-up salute back in the old Reichstag days. I wonder if he’s making some kind of statement about that, because I feel as if this art, this sculpture, this small, green, smirking bird-flipping gnome, this how you say satire, is talking, you know, exclusively to me.

Publisher's Weekly's Review of HOLY WATER makes otherwise miserable novelist downright giddy.

2010-02-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

Reviews of New Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction and Comics
-- Publishers Weekly, 2/8/2010
Holy Water James P. Othmer. Doubleday, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-385-52513-8

The latest from Othmer (The Futurist) reads like a very contemporary Heart of Darkness run through the satire blender. Longtime company man Henry Tuhoe has a self-absorbed wife who is learning witchcraft and pressuring him to have a vasectomy; he’s increasingly alienated from his friends, and is forced to decide between getting fired or accepting a new position opening a call center in an obscure Third World country called Galado. So he takes the job. That the call center doesn’t have working telephones or employees who can speak English are just a couple of Henry’s concerns in a plot that bounces between everyday realism and the absurd. His new workplace is as morally and spiritually corrupt as the corporate culture back home, and Henry makes it his personal humanitarian mission to help provide clean water to Galado’s poorest citizens. Othmer wrings humor from nearly every facet of contemporary culture, with many of the most comical moments taking place in brief anecdotes (as with a Gulf War I re-enactor). It’s well-done satire—dark, but not too—in the vein of Gary Shteyngart and early Colson Whitehead. (June)

Super Bowl Ad Recap in the Daily Beast

2010-02-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

Super Bowl Advertisers Play It Safe

by James P. Othmer
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-08/super-bowl-ads-play-it-safe/?cid=tag:mostrecent1

Former ad exec James Othmer on why Abe Vigoda and Betty White were the stars of last night—and how companies are being cautious post-Tiger.

If the Super Bowl ads of a given year are a reflection of our culture, if not the national zeitgeist, then welcome to the Age of Vigoda. In the Age of Vigoda, as evidenced by last night’s game, Super Bowl branding built around the high-energy star power of emerging mega-celebrities has been supplanted by ads featuring the likes of 83-year-old Don Rickles (Teleflora), 88-year-old Betty White (Snickers) and the 88-year-old Abe Vigoda (Snickers), whose most recent brush with fame occurred when People magazine erroneously reported him dead in 1982.

After decades of Super Bowl ads featuring present-tense stars near the height of their fame—from Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett (Noxema) to Michael Jackson, Madonna and Britney Spears (Pepsi)—why the sudden rush on fading and octogenarian celebs? A case can be made that nostalgia plays well with an aging boomer population, supported by the fact that the White/Vigoda Snickers spot took the top position in USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter consumer poll. Another reason for the lack of a 21st-Century pop culture star presence can be attributed to the fact that Pepsi, the brand associated with so many of the most famous celebrity and youth-focused Super Bowl ads, sat out last night’s game for the first time in 23 years, choosing instead to spend more than $20 million on its caused-based, celeb-free, social media campaign, Pepsi Refresh.

In the Age of Vigoda it’s much better to play it safe—as brands did last night with ads featuring Kiss, Charles Barkley, Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprising their roles in National Lampoon Vacation (were the 1980s really that special?)—than risk squandering years of equity and consumer trust, not to mention tens of millions of dollars on a present-tense star who can be wearing a green Master’s Jacket one minute and be licking his wounds in sex addiction counseling the next.

Celebrity spokesperson meltdowns are nothing new. It’s always been risky for brands to go all in with an endorser at the top of the Q-ratings, but now advertisers seem more reluctant to go there then ever. Perhaps the poor economy allows brands less room for failure. Or perhaps the 24/7 TMZ news cycle, combined with the transparency and ubiquity of Internet gadgets has made celebrities more susceptible than ever to humiliating exposure. Of course, because of this, the only thing we enjoy more than the ascent of a celebrity is their plummet to mug shot, scandal-sheet hell.

So rather than seeing the stars of the moment performing in our ads and on our halftime shows, we are entertained by those who have won our trust over the span of decades. Tiger Woods and John Edwards have begotten Abe Vigoda and Betty White. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake have led to Tom Petty and The Who. Apparently Roger Daltry is less of a risk to have a wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson, but lord help us all if he does.

The exceptions, of course, are the lesser brands that use the Super Bowl as a platform to court controversy and shock their way into a larger cultural discussion. Focus on the Family did this brilliantly this year with its now famous Tim Tebow pro-life/anti-abortion ad. The ad was a snooze, coming right after the Snickers ad and using the same visual gag originated years ago with Reebok’s Terry Tate, Office Linebacker classic, but it didn’t matter. The Focus on the Family ad was the most talked about ad for two weeks leading up to the game. Similarly the gay dating service Mancrunch.com got millions in free PR when CBS rejected its ad, prompting claims and counterclaims of discrimination and homophobia. One gets the sense that, with network TV struggling as a viable platform for advertisers the other 364 days of the year, the Super Bowl with its 100 million viewers may become a magnet for more and more intentionally controversial one-hit wonders.

Last night several brands avoided the possibility of celebrity endorser blowup by eliminating humans altogether: Kia Motors cast its quirkily appealing commercial for the Sonesta with a Sock Monkey puppet, Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba and the Mr. X toy; one of Coke’s uncharacteristically flat spots starred the animated cast of The Simpsons; and from Google, the brand that could have spent more production dollars than anyone, came the most simple, charming, and effective ad of the night, Paris Love Story, which brilliantly managed to distill the powerful human arc of a long-term romance and the utility of its search function down to a series of typewritten words in the brand’s iconic box. I never thought of Google as anything other than a soulless conglomerate bent on ruling the world, but that ad made me blink.

Toyota also went the all-type route with its buzzkilling mea culpa ads about the circumstances surrounding its crippling recall and repair effort. This was quite a contrast to the joy and energy of Kia’s Sock Monkey Crew, as well as a winning ad for the Hyundai Sonato that defied the trend toward nostalgia and pseudo celebrities. Hyundai hired a genuine celebrity of the moment, Brett Favre, and sent him to a place where today’s scandals can never go: the future.

James P. Othmer is the author of ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet and the novel The Futurist.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Congratulations ADLAND Twitter Giveaway Winners

2010-01-29T13:24:00.000-08:00

LEGAL COPY: Congratulations. With this valuable prize comes great (legally enforceable) responsibility. Please read carefully before accepting your gift. Winner agrees to become James P. Othmer's social media BFF (ie: #FF recos, Retweets, FB "Likes" and serial reposts). Winner agrees to write a five star Amazon review of no less than two paragraphs. Winner agrees to frequently troll the ad blogs and comment when necessary, praising Othmer and refuting slights against his career, writing ability and any mention of a hairpiece. Winner agrees to read the book in public places (or at least wrap the cover around another book) and laugh out loud (preferably a guffaw) while shaking the head and saying, things such as "That James P. Othmer just kills me!" or "They have to make a movie out of this!"

Advance Praise for Holy Water trickling in.

2010-01-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

My second novel HOLY WATER comes out June 15 from Doubleday, and while I'm still working hard on behalf ADLAND, I wanted to share some of early blurbs that have come in from three of my favorite writers: Ben Greenman (of The New Yorker), Jonathan Evison, and John McNally.

"Saul Bellow had Henderson, the Rain King. Bioy Casares had The Invention of Morel. James P. Othmer has Holy Water, and you should, too. Othmer's hero is a modern man whose life has ceased to make sense to him, and his escape to a distant nation raises (and then gleefully answers) all kinds of questions about love, life, god(s), health, big business, and bottled water. They say that no man is an island, but Othmer's Henry Tuhoe comes close." -Ben Greenman, author of What He's Poised to Do and Please Step Back

"Holy Water is hilarious, disquieting, razor sharp, and Now with a capital N . . .Othmer is an absurdist straight from the trenches, a keen-eyed witness to the troubling but strangely hopeful times in which we live, and a stylist of the first order." --Jonathan Evison, author of All About Lulu and West of Here

“If you’ve been looking for Kurt Vonnegut’s successor, look no further. James P. Othmer has picked up the master satirist’s torch and taken off running with it. The moment you meet Henry Tuhoe, Vice President of Underarm Research, you know you’ve entered a world that is at once wildly absurd and frighteningly credible. If ever there was a novel for these troubled and bizarre times, this is it. What The Futurist predicted, Holy Water confirms: Mr. Othmer is on the brink of a major career. So it goes.” --John McNally, author of After the Workshop and The Book of Ralph

Also, stay tuned for Holy Water related news about an alliance with a major water charity, and hopefully a massive, yet well-intentioned launch party.

Speaking of Speaking Engagements

2010-01-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

This is a big deal for me. A few weeks ago, the organizers of The Art of Marketing Conference in Toronto contacted me to see if I'd be interested in appearing as a speaker for the one day (March 2nd) event (theartofmarketing.ca). The other speakers: Seth Godin, Dan Heath, Sally Hogshead, Mitch Joel and Max Lenderman. Unlike me, they are all speaking circuit stars, and unlike me, they are all bestselling authors. I've presented before hundreds of clients, spoken to filled university auditoriums, and also to sales forces and marketing departments of corporate groups. But this kind of gig is a first.

I now realize there are several reasons for this: first, my 2006 novel THE FUTURIST, wasn't exactly kind to the denizens of the pro speaking circuit. In fact, when the book came out I received quite a few angry letters from futurists who claimed that I was out to undermine their livelihood. My response: if your livelihood is peddling bullshit, then that's the way it goes. If your livelihood is to share valuable insights about business and culture, then you have nothing to worry about (other than your incredibly thin skin). Other than university appearances, where my topics were corporate ethics, vocation and the search for meaning in work, speaking gigs were slow to materialize for THE FUTURIST. At one point I was asked to speak to the marketing and sales force of a large software company for a fee that was 10 times more than I'd ever made in a day. Then, three weeks before the event, the organizer called to cancel. Her boss did not get the humor or the message of the book. "What is he gonna do," her boss speculated, "tell us all to quit and go find meaning?"

With ADLAND, the speaking situation has been more encouraging, and I believe that the change in our economy and our place in the world has something to do with this. One would think that a recession would further increase the focus on profit, but I've found that people are increasingly eager to not just talk about work, but work with meaning. ADLAND looks at the ad industry and my career without sentimentality, or glorification, or the sort of "Top 10 Ways to Reinvigorate Your Brand and Your Life" lists that are requisite in the pop business book world. Instead, it describes the good and the bad of the business and my intention was that it would have value for anyone thinking of entering the ad profession, or who is rethinking their place in it. To be sure, there's plenty of wisdom and insights in ADLAND, including a straightforward look at the future of advertising (which I promise I will discuss on March 2 in Toronto). But it also speaks to the soul of the modern businessperson.

In 2010 people want more than rules to be successful in the workplace. They want insight into the human condition. More and more clients are getting this. For starters, they're calling more. And they're asking me to discuss the ethical questions that face not just branding folks, but anyone working in the information age. Audiences like the idea of someone telling tales from the trenches of adland, rather than from a corner office. They nod their heads when I tell them that there is value, opportunity and honor in learning and leading from the middle. At the Brandcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University I told an auditorium filled with some of the most promising ad students in the world that not all was exciting and sparkly in their chosen profession. I told them, from 20 years of experience, that not everyone would rise to have their name on the door of an agency, and that they should constantly evaluate their place in their agency and their life. Just to be sure, I threw in a list: Top Five Ways to Keep Your Career from Sucking. I'm looking forward to joining such an esteemed lineup in Toronto, and to not sucking.

The Futurist movie update: We Have a Script (sort of).

2010-01-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

I don't get a ton of reader mail, but when I do, it often includes an inquiry about the status of the film version of my 2006 novel THE FUTURIST. Well, lately there's been some movement, and here's what I can report: After three years of seeking the perfect screenwriter and/or director, we found both at the start of last year, and get this -- it's the same person! This person, who has written and directed four successful films, and whose name I've been asked to not mention until we have real news, spent much of the last year writing a script. The first draft, I was told, was great and true to the book, but long. The second draft was also great, true to the book, and shorter, but still kind of long, which I find funny because the book was only 276 pages. The third and hopefully final draft is due soon. When everyone loves this draft the next step will be to take it to my dream choice for the role of Yates who, incidentally, has read the book and has met our writer/director and is quite interested in the part. If dream actor is good with it, and not previously committed to five years worth of other dream actor projects, I'm told that the script/writer-director/dream actor package will then go to the studios, seeking the proverbial green light. Which would be nice.

Belligerent Gnomes, Hitler, Art and Good Company

2010-01-18T14:57:00.000-08:00

Lift Trucks Project is an exchange between artists and writers curated by Pam Hart of the Katonah Museum of Art. The opening/reading is 1/30 from 5-8pm and the exhibit runs through 3/27 at their space near the Croton Falls train station. A few months ago Pam asked me to participate and let me pick my subject from among many fine artists of international renown. I chose Ottmar Horl's Plastic Garden Gnomes Giving the Finger not because I knew anything about Horl, who is also the creator of Plastic Garden Gnomes Saluting Heil Hitler, but because who could resist not one but two garden gnomes giving the world the bird? My piece, from which they have generously invited me to read on 1/30, is actually a conversation between Adolph Hitler's Ghost and Joseph Goebbel's ghost about the racial purity of gnomes, censorship, Horl's controversial status in Germany, and Hitler's lost Rotweilers Playing Poker paintings. For more, see LTProject.com.

ADLAND is one of FAST COMPANY magazine's Best of 2009

2009-12-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

The best books of the year have two stories to tell: How we got into this economic crisis (and how we can prevent it from happening again) and how there's a class of companies wreaking their own brand of havoc on their industries. Both offer fascinating tales of innovation, and you'll learn everything from the secret underpinning some of the world's fastest-growing companies to strategies and insights for building a more sustainable society in the wake of the recession.
Adland by James P. Othmer
State-of-the-industry advertising manifestos are usually written by titans of the business, not former mid-level creatives who bounced around a number of large agencies. Yet this unlikely guide is the perfect one to take us through the apocalypse current roiling "Adland." Othmer shows us what's wrong about the old model by telling war stories with a jaundiced eye, and he then uses that same eye to look in on the cutting-edge, next-generation "don't call us an ad agency" creative shops defining the future.
Essence in a quote: "Instead of the traditional copywriter/art-director dynamic employed by most ad agencies, 42 Entertainment (which is also the company behind the campaign for the highly successful launch of the box-office-record-breaking Batman film The Dark Knight) typically relies on its alternate-reality-game background and involves everyone from sci-fi authors and sitcom writers to video game developers to create an experience that they say is exponentially more engaging and immersive than any traditional TV commercial."
The full list: Adland, Bright-Sided, Busted, Change by Design, Create Your Own Economy, Googled, In Cheap We Trust, In-N-Out Burger, Leadership, Strategy for Sustainability, Viral Loop

In Ad Age, Cindy Gallop Gives Adland Three Martinis, Up

2009-12-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

'Futurist' Author Returns to Share His Adman Past
Cindy Gallop Gives 'Adland' Three Martinis, Up

by Cindy Gallop on 12.02.09

Some months ago I came across @drapersbastard on Twitter, proclaiming himself the "branded spawn of a titanic ego and someone from the secretarial pool who had one too many gimlets." His tweets were funny, simultaneously pointed and poignant. So I started following him. I'm a big fan of clever faux industry Twitterers, like @NotSirSorrell, and actually find @BogusBogusky rather more entertaining than @bogusky. (Sorry, Alex!)

I became so intrigued I challenged @drapersbastard to a Three-Martini Lunch. Subsequent dialogue revealed that @drapersbastard was in fact James P. Othmer, author of bestselling novel "The Futurist" and, most recently, an industry romp called "Adland." James and I became "social media friends" -- that is, friends who'd never actually met until our most enjoyable Three-Martini Lunch at 11 Madison Park in September (thoroughly recommended, by the way).

I highlight this original encounter because it is emblematic of why I found "Adland" such an enjoyable and profound read. "Adland" is a meditation on our industry through the lens of a personal story, told by a veteran of the Old World Order who is rapidly acclimatizing to the new. It resonates with everything we love about this industry, everything we hate, everything that keeps us working in it, everything that makes us want to leave and everything that makes us believe in what could still be possible.

"Adland" had me at Chapter 1, which tells the story of Y&R, as the incumbent, trying to retain a very large account that's up for review. Othmer, a former Y&R creative director, is careful not to identify the account, but industry readers will place it immediately. (Especially if, like me and BBH, yours was one of the "younger, hipper" agencies on the pitch list.) It's a brilliant encapsulation of a mix of emotions, ridiculousness, error and desperation that's all too appallingly recognizable:

"With advertising there's something about the combination of having to solve a major corporation's strategic problem in a creative way, while a clock is ticking, the whole time knowing that others in your building and in buildings around the world are also trying to solve the same problem, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, that is thrilling and somewhat addictive. ... It is creativity. And in the right environment it is contagious. This is what happened to us that morning under the fluorescent lights at that ugly conference table. ... The negativity of the cynic was replaced by the enthusiasm of the creative evangelist. It's a great time. But it is also the most dangerous time for a creative advertising person or anyone in the business of creating ideas for others. Because it is when we begin to care."

"Adland" speaks to all of us who care. It combines Othmer's personal journey with an exploration of how our industry is facing the future via dialogues with Toy, BBDO, Fahrenheit 212, Droga5 and Goodby. Buy it now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld, an extremely simple crowd-sourced web platform designed to turn good intentions into action that will be launched this fall. Ms. Gallop spent most of her advertising career at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, where she launched the agency's New York office. She continues to work as an advertising and marketing consultant and is an adviser to a number of technology and media startups. In 2003, Advertising Women of New York named her its Advertising Woman of the Year.

Galley Cat on Hudson's Best Books of 2009 List, featuring ADLAND

2009-11-24T07:21:00.001-08:00

Best Books of 2009, Airport Edition
By Jason Boog on Nov 23, 2009 12:23 PM
A few writers received an unexpected bookstore boost today as they nabbed spots on Hudson Booksellers' Best Books of the Year list. The list will earn these writers some coveted placement in the company's bookstores, reaching the most captive readership in the whole world--the airport reader.

Hudson runs 65 full-service bookstores around North America, but sells books in over 350 Hudson News stands in airports and transportation hubs. This year the company sold $93 million worth of books. Here are the fiction winners, a list with only a single National Book Award nominee on it. The best nonfiction, business, and young adult books follow after the jump...

Best Fiction: "The Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood, "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, "Spooner" by Pete Dexter, "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver, "Fool" by Christopher Moore, "The Song is You" by Arthur Phillips, "Lark & Termite" by Jayne Anne Phillips, "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, and "Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Best Business Interest: The Silver Lining by Scott D. Anthony, What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, Super Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Adland by James P. Othmer, Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Best NonFiction: Last Words by George Carlin, Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, Lit by Mary Karr, Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer, Either You're in or Youâ€™re in the Way by Logan and Noah Miller, Stitches by David Small, Emergency by Neil Strauss

Best Young Readers: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney

MEDIA BISTRO: SO WHAT DO YOU DO, JAMES OTHMER?

2009-11-20T15:42:00.001-08:00

So What Do You Do, James Othmer, Ad Creative Turned Author?
Truth in advertising comes through in this former creative director's revealing tome
By Mathew Van Hoven – November 18, 2009

James Othmer grew up thinking he'd go nowhere. A kid with zero direction, his only career advice came early on from his older sister, who suggested that his wise-cracking personality might be suited for a copywriting job in the advertising industry. To her credit, Othmer says, "She spent five minutes more than anyone else spent in my life at that time thinking about what Jim can do with his future." But it was the writing he later honed as a reporter for The Boston Globe and New Haven Register that truly propelled him into the field as a copywriter, and later creative director, leading campaigns for clients like KFC and AT&T.

Fast forward to today and Othmer has become an in-demand author. As his debut The Futurist is being prepped for the big screen, his recently released Adland is a tell-all of his days in the advertising world. Drawing on his experiences watching Young & Rubicam miss the 'Internet' boat along with almost everyone else, Othmer takes us through what it was like knowing his once-Herculean shop couldn't compete with smaller, nimbler agencies. And he was partially to blame. Those stories and others were the basis for Adland -- in which he describes himself as an average copywriter. Things haven't been any easier for him as an author. From one agent that quit representing him to go to clown school to another that passed away, Othmer's been to the bottom more than once. We sat down to discuss how he got back up and where he's going next.

Name: James P. Othmer
Position: Writer/creative consultant
Resume: Started out as a reporter for The Boston Globe and New Haven Register. Later did stints as a copywriter and creative director for several companies, including Dell Publishing, Franklin Spier, Grey Entertainment & Media, and Young & Rubicam. Author of The Futurist, Adland, and Holy Water. Also a freelance contributor for Esquire, Condé Nast Portfolio, New York Times, Forbes, and more.
Birthdate: October 17, 1960
Hometown: Mahopac, NY
Education: B.S. in Journalism from Northeastern University; MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.
Marital status: Married 26 years.
First section of the Sunday New York Times: "Week in Review."
Favorite TV show: CBS Sunday Morning
Last book read: Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Guilty pleasure: "Going out and pretending I still have an expense account."

Tell us a little about your background in advertising and your transition to published author.
I got into advertising in a roundabout way -- unlike people, say at Creative Circus or VCU Brand center, who are fixed on it and know what they want to do and are locked in on advertising as a career. I started as a journalist. I left The Boston Globe and the New Haven Register and gave up on some sports writing because I didn't want to work nights and weekends, and the money wasn't so wonderful. So I went into publishing and then eventually writing ads about books. And then I went to a mainstream agency; my first big mainstream agency was N.W. Ayer. I left newspapers so I didn't have to work nights and weekends, but I immediately realized that advertising was all about working nights and weekends.

I never looked at [becoming an author] as a change; I looked at it as a goal. I realized that if I wrote a nice little jewel of a novel that would have a small readership and was well-reviewed, I would never come close to making the money I was making, even as a copywriter. I realized it was an unrealistic goal to say I'll be a self-sustaining writer of fiction. So I kept at it, and I wrote three novels. I had several agents. One agent died, one agent quit to go to clown school.

Clown school, seriously?
Yeah. She quit to go to clown school. We were going to talk about auction strategy [for my first book], and soon after, she informed me that she would be going to clown school. So I went home to my wife and I said, "My agent is going to clown school. If I really want to write at this point, when your agent goes to clown school, you must really want it bad." Because if there was ever a time to completely be psychologically crushed, this would be the time. I even thought, you know, "Can you do both?" I wanted to, like, beg [my agent] to stay and, "Just make sure to take the little red nose off and the big shoes before you go into pitches," but I realized that even if I wasn't guaranteed success or publishing, being published, I was going to stick to it. And ironically that's when I wrote the first chapter of The Futurist, and that set things in motion.

"Writing radio copy [for] the ear while there's a clock ticking and a pissed off client and a celebrity talent in the next booth... is a really interesting exercise that has to make you a better writer."

Could you ever go back to advertising?
I have gone back. It's funny -- I Tweeted the other day, "What's the difference between freelancing and consulting?" I guess pay, a little bit. And you feel a little bit better about yourself consulting. But I've been asked to come in and not knock out ads, but take a look at a brand, and lift the hood up and see if there was something I could bring to it.

What motivated you to write Adland?
I did not write Adland as a love letter to advertising, nor did I write it as a condemnation to advertising. I just thought that as a novelist, as a journalist, and as a writer who happened to spend 20 years in advertising during this really amazing transitional time, it would be great for someone to get it down who was on the inside, wasn't a CEO, wasn't a legendary ad person, and wasn't an embedded journalist. It's kind of a middle manager's story of what it's like, and that's the part where I realize the timelessness, timeliness of it wasn't important, because if you can do that and say, "This is what it's like."... When you get a job, think about what it entails, what the implications are, what the consequences are, what the choices are. If there's a good thing that I've noticed, [it's that] younger people are asking those questions before they start, unlike sad people like me who ask these questions 20 years later having a 48-year-old midlife crisis. I think that the fact that it's written by a relative nobody, truthfully without an agenda to say, "This is how I did this, and how I translated this industry, company," is kind of good.

You explain in Adland that you were nudged into advertising by your sister. Is there anything about your youth that stands out and shouts that you were meant for advertising, or writing?
A friend who followed me a long time in my advertising read [Adland], and he had read a couple of pieces of the fiction and some of my earlier ads. He said, "You tapped into your inner wise-ass." It's not this great story about how I found my voice, but I think he's right, and I think my sister saw that I had a gift with language, I had a vivid imagination, I had a smart mouth and I was curiousTo her credit, she spent five minutes more than anyone else spent in my life at that time thinking about what Jim can do with his future, and she said advertising would be good.

What was the worst experience you had in the advertising business, and what effect did that have on your career as an author?
I think my worst experience was the KFC experience. I was asked to help out on a pitch, [and] I enlisted my nephew to help. He was going to school in Florida State at the time, and he did the demos for me in his garage. The next thing I know, my nephew was driving from the suburbs, 50 miles, to work with me every day and watching me get yelled at by clients. I think we had just lost Citibank and I had to build something that was ours again, so I said, "Okay, I'll do KFC." And it was not the most rewarding creative experience. It was lots of travel, lots of tension, and lots of stress because the account was about to walk. We saved it, but they ultimately walked while I had it.

"[While] researching Adland, I found shops still saying, 'This is our digital side, and this is our other side.' It's really surprised me that it wasn't incumbent upon everyone to be versed in all of it."

You are a copywriter-turned-author. Talk about the transition from short-ish form to long form.
I think advertising was great training for fiction, and fiction was great training for advertising. I would pilfer freely from both sides. Writing radio copy [for] the ear while there's a clock ticking and a pissed off client and a celebrity talent in the next booth -- and you had to cut 20 seconds out and still maintain the concept -- is a really interesting exercise that has to make you a better writer. I was great at writing the vision statements, the strategic pitch thing, but I did not have some wonderful ad career or killer reel or anything. People who knew me in advertising knew I delivered good work, smart strategic work, creative work -- stuff that usually came in second place.

In Adland you reiterate that in the mid-late '90s, Young & Rubicam wasn't ready for the digital advertising changeover. What did it feel like to know that the techniques you'd used for years would need a complete overhaul?
Part of the problem with Y&R at the time was they were encumbered by legacy people, and teams, and systems, and satellite offices, and they would buy an Internet play rather than seamlessly integrate it into the program. And then I went walking around the country in 2007-2008 researching Adland, I found shops still saying, "This is our digital side, and this is our other side." It's really surprised me that it wasn't incumbent upon everyone to be versed in all of it.

How did you get permission to tell Y&R's stories in Adland?
I did not. It's funny 'cause most of the people are gone who are in the book. Most of the people, I think, I reflected upon them pretty well. If I complain about something, I'll usually give context and say, what I realize now is what strain they were under, or what they were hearing from their boss. I wasn't out to hammer the industry, or [to] hammer any individuals. But nah, I didn't ask permission.

It was already written?
It was already written. Yeah. So it was about a 16-month turn around just from a written book. Adland was very frustrating in that I really felt that there was a born-on date, or a shelf life for a book like this, and I urged my publisher to try to get it into print as quickly as possible. I put pencils down when I got back from Cannes in 2008, and [the book] didn't come out until mid-September of 2009.

How did you get your first book published as a relative unknown?
I published the first chapter of The Futurist in the Virginia Quarterly review. It came out in November of 2004, I believe, and it was then picked with Salman Rushdie and a couple of other writers as a finalist for the National Magazine Award for fiction. So after clown school agents and agents who died and all that stuff, I had agents calling me for the first time. The guy I ended up with is John Grisham's agent.

What's next for you?
My next novel will be called Holy Water; it's coming out in June. That's about a water-filtration salesman who gets transferred to a third-world nation to open up a back office in a drought-plagued nation. His wife has thrown him out of the house because he lied about his vasectomy. It's one of those books. But he's vice president of Underarms and Sweat at a P&G Colgate-like multinational. It's this kind of droning job. It touches upon globalization, consumerism, 'What are we doing with our lives?'

I have TV projects in the works. The Futurist is being produced as a feature film by Reason Pictures. It's not on any schedule yet, but it's been optioned, there's a film option for that. There's a good director attached to it, there's a really good actor that I can tell you off the record, attached to it.

Mathew van Hoven is editor of AgencySpy.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Veteran's Day Tribute

2009-11-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

I shot this AT&T commercial in Normandy 15 years ago in honor of the 50th Anniversary of D-day. Wrote about it in ADLAND and finally tracked it down thanks to Lisa Goore and Northern Lights Editorial. AD: Kenny Evans; Producer: Lisa Goore; CD: Steve Feinberg.

ADLAND goes back to press!

2009-11-11T04:34:00.001-08:00

Just heard from Doubleday that ADLAND is going back to press! Two months after pub date the book is still going strong: additional feature coverage, NPR appearances, bookstore signings (hopefully at my new BFF Hudson Booksellers), book club, library and fancy restaurant readings and plenty of new content are all planned for the weeks ahead. Thanks to all for your support and for spreading the word.

Hudson Booksellers Makes Adland a "Best of 2009" Book

2009-10-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

Hudson Booksellers has chosen ADLAND as one of the five Best Business Books of 2009!

Hudson, which has great stores across the country and in dozens of airports, will run its special "Best of 2009" program from December 1st through January 31, with special shelf talkers and in-store displays.

Here are the choices in Business: The Silver Lining - Scott D. Anthony, What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell, Super Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Adland - James P. Othmer, Cheap - Ellen Ruppel Shell.

Get thee to an airport.

Fortune Magazine: Adland "picks up where Mad Men leaves off."

2009-10-28T11:53:00.001-07:00

A Former Adman Tells all
by Jia Lynn Yang

MAD MEN, WHICH just won an Emmy for best drama, taps into nostalgia for the hedonistic glory days of Madison Avenue. Former adman James P. Othmer's new book picks up where the show leaves off. Sure, Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet confirms that the $1,100 expensed bar tab lives on, but it also shows how the rise of the Internet and the DVR have upended the industry. Othmer takes us through his 20-year career, in which he watched 133-year-old N.W. Ayer crumble, and muses about the industry's future.

COCKTAIL PARTY FODDER: The average American is hit by up to 20,000 ad "impressions" a day. Companies have learned if they play a 30-second spot for weeks, they can switch to a cheaper 15-second version and get the same level of recall. Othmer also describes efforts to please clients like Yum Brands' KFC. His agency would prepare clever songs when all the franchisees wanted were close-ups of honey dripping over chicken strips. But he refuses to be too cynical: "Saying you're disillusioned with advertising is like saying you're disillusioned with politics or the porn industry."

Media Bistro's ADLAND Launch Party Coverage on Galley Cat

2009-09-29T16:58:00.000-07:00

mediabistro.com's events team and AgencySpy got together last week to throw a party for James P. Othmer (center) last week celebrating the publication of Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet. Among those joining Othmer at Stone Creek Bar & Lounge for complimentary Hendrick's Gin cocktails and free copies of the book: Barbarian Group CEO Benjamin Palmer and director of communications Eva McClosky. For more of John Kealy's photos from the evening, visit mediabistro.com's Flickr set.

Trailer from the intro to ADLAND

2009-09-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

My friends and I put together a short video based on the introduction to ADLAND.

Hope you enjoy, and that you'll share with others:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHAyskfW6sU

Special thanks to the excellent Director/Art Director Kleber Menezes, Composer extraordinaire Joey Spallina at Tonefarmer and Tracy Spinney for the tasty VO.

TALKING ADLAND ON NPR'S TALK OF THE NATION ON WEDNESDAY!

2009-09-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'll be talking ADLAND and taking calls from around the country on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program Wednesday, September 23 at 3pm EST. For a station in your area, podcast and streaming live links, go to NPR.org.

Forbes.com "What's great about ADLAND is..."

2009-09-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

Book Review
An Ad Man's Lament
Michael Maiello, 09.22.09, 12:00 AM EDT
James P. Othmer's ''Adland.''
pic
Adland: Searching For The Meaning Of Life On A Branded Planet
By James P. Othmer (Doubleday, $26.95)

With the obvious exception of journalists, who do nothing but bring truth to the world with the best of intentions behind our every word and breath, all thoughtful people eventually have a crisis of faith about their careers. Sometimes you have to stop and ask what you're working so hard for. Or if what you're working for is making the world a better place. If you're a lobbyist, a lawyer or in advertising, these are the toughest times. All three fields are personality driven and involve the mercenary work of advocating for somebody else's interests.

James P. Othmer, once creative director of Young & Rubicam, starts his memoir, Adland, with a short monologue about selling. Would you, if it was your job, target the sale of a high-proof alcoholic beverage to a minority community? Or push cigarettes on minors, or, knowing what we know about them, anyone? Would you make commercials to entice people to sign up for the military, where they could possibly die? Even if you did, isn't working in military recruitment a kind of public service? And if you wouldn't make commercials for the military or tobacco companies, have you also divested from defense and tobacco stocks? Is advertising a specifically questionable way to make a living, one that should be held to a higher standard than investing or stock picking?

What's great about Adland is that Othmer resists the temptation to offer easy answers. Othmer is a former ad man turned novelist, not a reformed pitch guy who is out to redeem his soul. He likes advertising and the people he worked with. To the outsider, some of his descriptions of conversations with colleagues and superiors will have a surprisingly highbrow tone.

Othmer's co-workers were well-educated, well-read and erudite--OK, the clients weren't, but what do you want from a bunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisees? Those guys who take chauffeured white Cadillacs to the annual meetings of KFC-owner Yum! Brands may not be scholars, but they're the backbone of the company, and they do know chicken. Sometimes Othmer had to take meetings with the developers of a product that chemically shrinks cat turds. But often he took meetings with highly energetic and visionary co-workers who conducted the kinds of discussions we might otherwise imagine were taking place in one of Gertrude Stein's salons. This is how advertising turned Othmer into an artist.

Of course there's an ethical component to all of this. Othmer tries to write down every ad he encounters in a single day and the result definitely suggests that even modest consumers of media are besieged by pitches. But honestly, don't we want this sometimes? That the local car dealership is offering 0% financing is good information to have if you're in the market to buy a car. If a commercial tells you when a movie you want to see is opening, that's a good thing, right? Does the commercial make you want to see the movie? Yeah, probably a little. But worrying too much about advertising mind control probably gives the agency guys too much credit. From Othmer's description, it seems that many more commercials fail than succeed.

So what's left to worry about? Cigarette ads because they push a harmful product. Pharmaceutical ads because they turn the patient into the consumer when it'd probably make more sense for better-informed doctors to handle the comparison shopping. But those are quibbles. Othmer asks: "What about this as a side effect of watching too many pharmaceutical ads: You tune in to a show feeling great and leave convinced that forces beyond your control are conspiring against you, physiological time bombs are rampaging through your veins and you have no fewer then seven potential syndromes pillaging your body?" A customer who suspects they will die without access to a product is a motivated buyer indeed.

Still, what really emerges as worth worrying about is the evolution of the industry toward the production of hidden ads.

Othmer spends some raucous pages with the owners of various "idea shops" who seek a convergence between entertainment, advertising, art and gaming. These are the people who want to up the ante on product placement. The infamous example of this was Burger King's 2004 "subservient chicken" Web site where an actor in a chicken costume performs tricks for Web users to promote chicken tenders. The promotion was indirect. The first users of the site didn't know it had anything to do with Burger King or fried chicken parts. The first users thought they were playing a game or participating in some odd performance art.

The industry wants to master the subtle or even invisible sell, and Othmer likes the people behind this. They're very likable: cool, smart, rich, like alumni of the dot-com boom who went on to embrace the life of the mind. It's not a stunningly new turn for advertising, either. Those Transformers cartoons I watched as a kid back in the '80s were nothing but long-form commercials, and even an 8-year-old could see it was no mere coincidence that a new character showed up on the show and in toy stores right at the same time.

Anyone concerned about this should take Othmer's book as a reminder that just about anything you do online, or with your high-def cable box or with an iPhone, is likely a sales pitch. It's just worth taking the time to ask "what do these people want of me?" Othmer's book can serve as a field guide to our new "stores are never closed" reality.

Michael Maiello is the editor of Markets and Intelligent Investing at Forbes.

Wall Street Journal's Smart Money: The Best Fall Reads

2009-09-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

7 Smart Books: The Best Fall Reads

Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet

By James P. Othmer
Reviewed by: Sarah Morgan

Othmer's is two books about advertising in one — both entertaining and thought-provoking, but somewhat awkwardly joined.

In the first half, "Mad Men" fans hoping to peek into an advertising world that's still as rakishly glamorous as Don Draper's a generation later will not be disappointed. Othmer delivers a funny memoir of his time abusing expense accounts on Madison Avenue. He also captures the frustrations of trying to produce creative work while hemmed in by a client's narrow focus on minutia like seconds devoted to food footage in a television commercial to the font size in a print ad.

The story itself suffers, however, from a lack of detail. Many characters, clients and campaigns go unnamed (to protect the innocent?), leaving the amusing anecdotes ungrounded. Plus, the second half of "Adland" shifts abruptly in tone and focus, as if it were a different book altogether. But while the shift is jarring, the material is compelling, especially Othmer’s analysis of web advertising and the branded, interactive "experiences" that may or may not be possible in the future. His sharp voice helps cut through the hype, and underscores how the distinction between entertainment and advertising is vanishing more quickly than anyone imagines.

The Daily Beast names ADLAND one of"This Week's Hot New Reads"

2009-09-16T16:39:00.001-07:00

This Week's Hot Reads
by The Daily Beast

Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet
by James P. Othmer
Mad Men’s glamour is absent from this Madison Avenue memoir.
James P. Othmer, author of the novel The Futurist, worked his way up from a small ad agency to a top-shelf firm, only to discover that at the millennium, the big guys were looking to smaller agencies for guidance on how to handle new media. Part memoir, part journalistic account, Othmer’s book recounts his experiences on commercial shoots in South Africa and meetings with pampered executives, as well as giving a history of the business through interviews with creators of classic characters (the Jolly Green Giant) and those of breakthrough viral campaigns like Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken.” In an essay about the industry in The Washington Post, Othmer wrote, “[W]hile we can now assert more control over advertising, we're unwillingly being bombarded by more messages than ever, infiltrating our lives in new and increasingly insidious ways…Advertising is a tension between art, commerce and ethics.”

Largehearted Boy "One of the pop culture must reads of the year"

2009-09-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2009/09/book_notes_jame_6.html

September 16, 2009
ADLAND by James P. Othmer
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Adland is part memoir, part examination of advertising's effects on modern culture, and in both instances the book succeeds. James P. Othmer's experience in advertising as well as his keen eye and wicked humor fill the book with insightful and often hilarious anecdotes in one of the year's pop culture must-reads.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

"After a giddy beginning banging out copy for a small ad agency, Othmer, a longtime creative director and copywriter, worked his way to the top in 2000 only to discover that his traditional agency was being abandoned in favor of forward-thinking brand stewards who wanted hip new ideas from smaller shops well-versed in new media and digital marketing. Fascinated by groundbreaking interactive campaigns like the 2007 Nine Inch Nails Internet Easter egg hunt and Burger King's Subservient Chicken gag, he found his love for advertising reinvigorated, and his book is an effort to better understand the inescapable industry's influence on culture."

In his own words, here is James P. Othmer's Book Notes music playlist for his book, Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet:

In Adland, I write that advertising is based upon a tension between art, commerce and ethics. And in recent years nothing represents this tension better than the ad industry's relation to the music industry.

Without a doubt, advertising has been stealing the soul of great music for almost a century. But in recent years, there have been an increasing number of instances where ads have helped bring an artist or band sudden mainstream attention. A quick online poll of friends, many still in advertising, for songs ruined or made popular by ads within minutes received dozens of responses within minutes, including these, which range from the inspired, to the downright depressing. For the artist, the brand, for you and me.

"'Major Tom' for Chrysler... Bowie should be kicked in the nuts for that."

"I discovered the band Rogue Wave, when I heard their song "Lake Michigan" on a commercial for Microsoft's already forgotten Zune. Great band, though."

"I think the iPod ads did a lot for the artists featured on them: Jet, Feist, U2. OK, maybe not U2."

"Steve Winwood wrote the song ‘Don't You Know What The Night Can Do' for a Michelob commercial, then had the balls to also include it on his subsequent album. Talk about double-dipping."

"The Clash's ‘London Calling' (nuclear apocalypse) to sell Jaguars, or Iggy Pop's heroin fueled ‘Lust for Life' for Carnival Cruise lines."

"Nick Drake, ‘Pink Moon', VW."

"Sting/Jaguar and Elvis Costello/Lexus did these really obnoxious commercials that were supposed to be about the music and the art, but were really just sleazy soft-sells for the cars. Elvis's even had a Beethoven track, not Elvis's music so, see? He's not a sell-out. What a tool!"

"2 of my favorite misused songs for commercials: ‘Golden Brown' by the Stranglers is about heroin, Ore-Ida used it for their french fries, and ‘Fortunate Son' by John Fogerty, critical of rich boys avoiding the draft during the Vietnam war but used by Tommy Hilfiger to promote that same rich, preppy lifestyle."

Much of Adland is about the choices we make as artists and professionals, particularly some of the choices I wrestled with as a would-be novelist working in advertising. Would you work on a cigarette account? Fast food? But the questions I ask apply to any profession creative or otherwise in the information age, particularly music: If you've already made billions would you give a classic song from your catalog to a car or software company, or Led Zeppelin did with Cadillac ("Rock and Roll"), or the Stones with Microsoft ("Start Me Up")? And of course it's different if you're a struggling artist, as Nick Drake might have been categorize pre-VW (I heard he sold more albums in the first month after the spot ran than he had in his entire career). Would using your song on a very special episode of The OC, or for a Nike commercial constitute selling out, or is it a smart move in a business in which it's now almost impossible to break through?

Damned if I know. Anyway, here's some of the music I listened to while writing Adland.

Tony Bennett "The Best is Yet to Come".

I interviewed Bennett in his suite in Cannes just before he gave a special performance to a hundred or so advertising big shots in the ballroom of the Hotel Majestic. It was during the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. My friend Josh Rabinowitz, who runs the music department at Grey advertising had set up the meeting. Because I was writing about advertising I was supposed to ask him about his relationship with Target, or the fact that Grey and Yahoo had sponsored that night's performance. Instead, while he sipped a bowl of tomato soup, we talked about creativity: painting and Miles Davis and Count Basie and never singing a song such as this selection the same way twice. For this reason our talk never made it into the book. Who cares? I got a free education, and he gave an amazing performance.

Loretta Lynn "Van Lear Rose"

I don't think Loretta Lynn or Jack White gives a damn about branding, but collaborating on this album was a stroke of brilliance. Not as good as White's collaboration with Johnny Cash, but up there.

The Hold Steady "Sequestered in Memphis"

This song and this album grew on me because of the music but also because they bring vividly to life compelling narrative adventures. I don't have the focus or attention span to piece together story or meaning if the words to a song are cryptic, especially while writing. But this is right in your face: Dude goes on a business trip and gets himself in a shit-load of trouble. Not that this ever happened to me.

Tom Waits "Step Right Up"

The theme song for all hucksters, snake oil salesman, ad guys, and the late great Billy Mays (for Oxy Clean!) Not that Waits would ever let anyone use his work for a theme song, let alone the track for a commercial.

Joey Spallina "Real Thing"

Joey is currently being drawn and quartered by the tension between art, commerce and ethics. His first gig was a bunch of demos he wrote and performed for KFC for me while in college. Three of them sold. Now, by day he's a composer for the commercial music house Tone Farmer, and by night he's a singer songwriter. Oh, yeah, full disclosure: he's also my nephew.

The Arcade Fire "Keep the Car Running"

Listening to music while writing and editing non-fiction is easier for me than while writing a novel. This tune is a good late-day pick me up.

The National "All the Wine"

There's something brash and irresistibly Walt Whitmanesque about this song, beginning with the lines "I'm put together beautifully/Big wet bottle in my fist, big wet rose in my teeth/I'm the perfect piece of ass." All of which, of course, I'm not.

Gomez "How we Operate"
Wilco "Impossible Germany"
Death Cab for Cutie "I Will Possess Your Heart"

While working on Adland, all three of the above songs were regular rotation on my favorite public radio station, WFUV, which streams live out of Fordham University in the Bronx. Mix tapes are good, and Pandora is perfect at times, but nothing beats a station whose deejays are cultural curators, consistently pairing me with artists in tune with the syncopation of my soul.

Interview with ThreeGuysOneBook.com's Jonathan Evison

2009-09-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Evison: Today marks the release of James P. Othmer's ADLAND, which we've mentioned a number of times on this blog (see trailer here). Jimbo is a brilliant and hilarious dude, and we're excited to see this book do well, along with his novel HOLY WATER, also forthcoming from Doubleday. Since it's always a pleasure to talk with JPO, I did a little Q & A last week to mark his new release:

JE: It seems to me that the process of creating ads is very much a process of distillation--distillation of concept, of copy, of theme, of intent--utilizing an editorial skill set which might greatly benefit the navel gazers of the literary world. Talk to me about how being an ad-man has informed your writing.

JPO: As offensive as this may seem to literary purists, my tenure in advertising, and the string of jobs in publishing and journalism I had before it, had an enormous impact upon my growth as a writer. I've been a sports writer, a metro news writer, an obit writer; I've written brochures, press releases, catalog copy and jacket copy for book publishers; and for more than 20 years I made ads. Dipping in and out of these disciplines (all the while writing fiction nights and weekends) broadened my world view and made me a better, more versatile fiction writer. In writing workshops at NYU I was often given exercises or prompts, and in many ways ad assignments are like workshop exercises. For instance, writing for radio is all about writing for the ear, painting word pictures, cutting and revising copy for time, often with a pissed off client and celebrity voice over looking over your shoulder. A good billboard ad should be seven words or less, a sort of commercial haiku. A good print or TV commercial should be concise and provocative and somehow illuminate a truth about the human condition. And now with digital advertising brevity isn't as important as long form engagement, and everything is about narrative. At the ad festival in Cannes I saw things being done with non-linear, immersive narrative storytelling that would impress any fan of story, and may in fact be the precursor to a new form of digital, non-commercial storytelling. Only rather than revolving around the profound truths of art, the big ideas I saw in Cannes and other idea factories revolved around diapers. Or sneakers.

In advertising I would often be called upon to solve a major corporation's strategic problem under circumstances that most would consider the enemies of the fiction writer: while a clock is ticking, all the while knowing that others in my building and in buildings around the world were also trying to solve the same problem, with my job, the jobs of others and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. It was thrilling and somewhat addictive and ultimately, as I'm sure we'll get into later, soul crushing. I was a quick learner in advertising and a late bloomer as a novelist. However, more than anything, advertising has humbled me as a writer and a person, and given me a deep appreciation of the freedom and purity and possibilities that come from sitting alone in a room telling stories,without a Mad Man or client in sight.

JE: One thing I love about all your writing, is a pervasive sense of global culture, in particular, the nuances and repercussions of a global economy, and it's effect on the second and third worlds. Your stories always feels very topical and very "now" to me, and I admire that. While you're breaking down the boundaries of nationalism, I seem to be becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of what it means to be an American. Then it occurs to me, you're exploring the same theme, but from the outside-in. Does that make sense, or am I too stoned again? I'm probably too stoned again.

JPO: Hmmm. First, yes, I'm assuming you are too stoned again but, not surprisingly, you're making absolute sense. So congratulations on that! I never consciously sit down and say, Henceforth, I'm going to write about what it means to be an American or, I think that the prevailing theme of my work will be vocation, or What does it mean to lead a fulfilling 21st century life? But these are obviously the questions that have shaped first THE FUTURIST and now ADLAND and even my next novel, HOLY WATER, which is about a third world country not unlike Bhutan about to be ravaged by first world brands. But I'm not asking these questions on a grand universal plane; I'm exploring them on a personal level, through the quotidian actions of individuals. How does a seemingly decent human being get himself embedded in the deeper, darker workings of a globalized, logo-saturated, ubiquitously branded planet that, it just so happens, doesn't particularly like us? We obsessively steer our kids to make great sacrifices to get the grades and community service points to get into the college that will get them the job that will make them, in theory, successful. But then, so many good, educated and decent people get thrown out into the workforce and end up doing things they don't particularly like, often with dubious moral strings attached that no one seems to think about until their first mid-life crisis hits. What the fuck have I been doing for the last 5, 10, 20 years?

Regarding trends and having one's finger on the pulse of the now, I'm hardly William Gibson or Douglas Coupland. They do this much better than I do. In fact, if anything in my work to date, I have fun with the idea that anyone can claim to have his or her finger on the pulse of anything. Sure, someone may be able to predict that the Nehru shirt will make a comeback this Fall (take this to the bank, people!), but the truth is our pundit-worshiping society has failed to predict the most cataclysmic events of our time: 9/11, Hitler, Octomom, even the latest financial crisis. This is what we get for listening to Jim Cramer.

Because I've chosen as my protagonists (including, in ADLAND, me), white-collar professionals who work for multinational conglomerates it was inevitable that I'd consider things such as the impact of globalization and the way the world views us. And I have to say that I was incredibly naive about this. I was actually surprised, if only briefly, when I saw people dancing in the street in cities around the world after 9/11. My brother, a New York City fireman at the time, reacted with rage. I reacted – again, naively, but sometimes naïveté coupled with authentic curiosity is a great starting point for a writer – with wonder: Why? My initial reaction as a writer was to propose a series of books called EYES OF THE WORLD, in which everyday people from around the world would write essays telling Americans what they truly thought of us. Sort of an invitation to a dialogue. But my then agent told me it wouldn't sell because most Americans didn't care. So I wrote a comic novel, THE FUTURIST (and got a new agent), instead. What's interesting is how in eight years even this dynamic has changed. Our economic powerhouse status is being threatened, we're in a recession, the demographics of our population continue to shift, and we have a new president. How we speak and listen to the world and how the world speaks and listens to us in this new paradigm continues to fascinate me and is newly reflected in ADLAND and HOLY WATER. Finally, and sorry to ramble JE but stoned or not, you asked some big questions here, I think that your work, particularly WEST OF HERE, is very much about these same themes and questions. While the 19th century sections deal withAmerican expansion, and manifest destiny and capitalistic hunger, all of which was embraced with jingoistic fervor at the time, the 21st century sections bring to life the ramifications of those times, of that culture: dying industries and ways of life, ecological ruins, and of course its devastating impact on Native Americans.

JE: Now that you're officially no longer a debut novelist, could you talk a little bit about how the publishing process feels the second time around? More pressure? Less pressure? Different expectations?

JPO: Because I have a strong relationship with Bill Thomas, the Editor in Chief at Doubleday, and my agent David Gernert, who suggested I try to write about advertising and business in a way that's never been done, and who was also once the editor in chief at Doubleday, the writing and editing went smoothly. Which means I proposed the book I wanted to write then went off and put together something quite different. Not entirely memoir, not entirely journalism, but all me. Periodically we'd get together and I'd share thoughts, ideas and pages and Bill would help shape it. Unfortunately I have the same pendulum expectations for this book that I had for THE FUTURIST, which means I allow myself to dream of trading barbs with Jon Stewart and Genius grants one moment while dropping into a deep, inconsolable funk, convinced that the whole enterprise is doomed, the next.

I never feel pressure while writing, but as soon as the edits are done the how the hell are we going to sell this hat goes on and the pressure kicks in. The pressure to sell books to pay bills in a post ad-guy life, coupled with the pressure of publishing during a recession, in an incredibly busy season, on the same day as some guy named Dan Brown doesn't help either. But really the only way to deal with it is to work your ass off to ensure that this thing that you poured heart and soul into for years gets into the right hands and finds a strong following. The biggest difference in the process this time around is that I have a different approach to time. With THE FUTURIST, I foolishly, inexplicably assumed that pub date was the day that everything would really kick in and that the roll up, which included some great coverage, was just a tease. And why not, the manuscript sold quickly, foreign rights sold quickly and we had a film option almost one year before pub date? But in fact (and this is probably not news to anyone but Mister Big Shot Ad Guy), 90% of the work on behalf of the book is done months beforehand and within weeks the press moves on and the book migrates from a stand on the front table to spine out on the fourth floor, between Orwell and O'Toole (which is really quite nice now that I think about it). Because it was fiction I'm not really sure if there's much that we could have done differently. Because ADLAND is non-fiction, and is about a topic that touches our culture in so many ways, and is riding on Don Draper's smoky coattails, there's been much more interest from the press and booksellers leading up to pub date. And now that social media has come into its own, I've enjoyed a really cool pre-pub dialog with booksellers, journalists and ad people on Facebook and Twitter, blogs, etc. that would not have happened three years ago. What's also interesting, and I think this is because the industry is in transition and eager to figure out what's next, is the level of interest that publishing people have had in the relationship between books, authors, and branding. I've written that advertising is about a tension between art, commerce and ethics, and in a lot of ways this construct applies to publishing, circa 2009. All of which means much more work this time, including a lot of essays, but it's all good and necessary and hopefully beneficial, so no gripes here.

JE: You've been at the writing game a long time, over twenty years, and I know that, like me, you've buried a few books, and agents, and probably even a few relationships over the long haul. Also, at the risk of starving yourself, you've walked away from a lucrative creative profession in advertising, as I walked away from talk radio (notice I don't use the word lucrative), all for the opportunity to write books which most of the world will never read. Please explain yourself.

JPO: My wife Judy, who renovates houses with her brother, has watched me hunched over a pad and paper every weekend, on every vacation for more than 25 years. In the 80's we'd meet after work at John's pizza on Bleeker for dinner before I went off to MFA classes with Doctorow at NYU. She's seen me tote a bushel full of rejection letters and dead manuscripts to an IRS audit. She's watched me see one agent die, one take me to an expensive lunch to talk "auction strategy" only to stop returning my calls when the auction never materialized, and another leave the business, as previously mentioned here, to go to clown school. The decision to walk away from advertising, at least temporarily (just before the economy and the freelance ad market went kaflooey!) was ours. There's a distinct difference between believing in someone and figuring out a budget for two kids, a mortgage and an addiction to fun. However if there was one individual moment that convinced me that I was a deeply disturbed person who absolutely had to write no matter what, it was after the novel prior to THE FUTURIST never sold. I was burnt out at work, discouraged by the commercial workings of publishing, and convinced that I'd never be published. But instead of depressing me it made me feel relieved, then exhilarated and then, strangely liberated. This may sound like bullshit but I couldn't wait to sit down and write without the weight of financial or commercial expectation, agents, editors or audience. Almost immediately I wrote the first line -- "The Futurist never saw it coming" -- and the rest poured out of me from there. A friend who was an early reader, and who had read my stuff for decades called me to say I'd found my voice. Actually he said "You've finally tapped into your inner wise ass." Who wouldn't want to do that for the rest of their life?

"Suggested Protocol for my E-book Signing" Essay from Publishers Weekly

2009-09-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Soapbox: E-structions
Suggested protocol for my e-book signing
by James P. Othmer -- Publishers Weekly, 9/14/2009

I am pleased to announce that next Wednesday between the hours of 6 and 8 p.m. EST I will be conducting an exclusive e-book signing of a limited number of first e-ditions of my latest title.

At noon on Tuesday, e-numbers will be distributed via an online distribution channel to my first 500 fans, many of whom will then proceed to spend an unforgettable night camped on sidewalks in the parallel universe of their choice.

For instance, after receiving your e-number, picture yourself waiting on an imaginary line in a quaint village close to a private university, with unique but not too pricey antique shops and an organic cafe, surrounded by people who have never watched reality TV. To help pass the time, feel free to participate in a communal sing-along (Wilco's “Sky Blue Sky,” “Novocain for the Soul” by the Eels or, for my substantial boomer readership, “Give Peace a Chance” are all fine choices). Or while away the hours recounting to avatar strangers ribald tales about the first time you met/read/slept with or stalked JPO (ahem, that would be me).

For those in the queue with energy to burn, a 14-year-old fan in Branson, Mo., recently texted to inform me that a Wii Sports version of Hacky Sack and Ultimate Frisbee is available online from e-booksigningsunlimited.com. Be sure to mention promotional code OTH-BOOK at checkout.

Please note: because of time constraints, I will only be able to autograph the $27.95 “hardcover” limited e-dition of this particular title. Legal and financial restrictions prohibit me from even acknowledging the existence of the $13.99 “trade paperback edition,” the $6.95 mass market paperback or the free Chinese bootleg version. Owners of these versions seeking an e-signature will have to wait until next year, or, for my Chinese fans, the advent of democracy in your fine country.

A few e-signing Don'ts: because time is limited, we ask that you please Don't make small talk when it is your turn at the e-table. Don't ask about sales, the weight of the author, the incident with the reviewer in Yakima, the death of the independent bookstore, the death of print or of any person, place or industry that is dead or likely to soon die.

Making eye contact with the author, while impossible, is discouraged nonetheless. It is recommended during your allotted 11 seconds that you fix your eyes somewhere between the tops of your Crocs and the undone belt on your terry cloth robe.

Because of my contractual arrangement with e-booksigningsunlimited.com, I regret that I will not be able to sign any previous e-book titles, blog posts or jpgs of other JPO-related memorabilia, including JPO action figures, bobble head dolls, limited edition cutlery sets or the Mr. October foldout from the collectible Naughty Authors 2009 Calendar.

For those who purchased the basic e-signing package, please remember that your choice of e-salutation is limited to:

To (insert your up to six character name here)

Best wishes or Warm Regards/JPO.

Subscribers to the premium sig app (U.S.$3.99/C$5.99) are entitled to an additional 17 characters as well as a small squiggly illustration that in all likelihood will be a smiley face.

For Platinum Level fans (U.S.$6.99/C$7.99), there will be a brief e-reading immediately following the e-signing. At 8:15 p.m. e-ttendees will be requested to assemble in the imaginary arena of their choice (Cozy Salon, Raucous University Auditorium, Intimate Off-Broadway Theater) and turn to page 143 of their recently signed limited e-ditions and read through the third paragraph of page 148, ending with the sentence: “Needless to say, neither the llama, nor my in-laws, would ever be the same again.”

At this point, as I make my way offstage, feel free to applaud for up to one minute. If you are a capable wolf whistler or feel the urge to hold up a flaming butane lighter, now is the time. Next, imagine that I have reluctantly emerged from the wings to take another bow. But alas, I cannot muster the energy for an encore, and must depart.

Typically, another three minutes of applause will suffice before the digital house lights come on.

Then log off and file out into the night. Or somewhere.
Author Information

James P. Othmer is the author of Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, which Doubleday published this week.

Sacramento Bee: Pick of the Week and something I never thought I'd write, "A juicy read".

2009-09-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

Between the Lines:
By Allen Pierleoni

Pick of the week

"Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet" (Doubleday, $26.95, 336 pages): Advertising permeates our lives, but those outside the industry are largely clueless about what goes on behind the closed doors at ad agencies.

The author knows; he's a former executive creative director at Young & Rubicam, a longtime major player on the ad scene. With wit and insight, he details the "morally dubious and strangely intoxicating" world in which he moved, peopled by dysfunctional clients and obsessive "team" members. If you think advertising is surreal and offensive, this book could alter your opinion – or not. Either way, it's a juicy read.

Publication Week

2009-09-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

ADLAND is available everywhere on Tuesday 9/15.

On Monday, I have an Op-ed on Obama's changing relationship with social media in The New York Times.

Also on Monday, I have a satirical essay on the e-book phenomenon in Publishers Weekly (PublishersWeekly.com).

On Tuesday, I have a piece on creative integrity on the TalentZoo.com site.

On Thursday, I'll be on WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show".

I'll post links to these and others as they become available.

Also, already scheduled for next week: an 9/21 appearance on NPR's "Talk of the Nation", Advertising Week in New York, a publication party 9/23, and new fiction all week on Fivechapters.com

Also, an excerpt from ADLAND, titled "Idea Factories", is now up on live on the Advertising Educational Foundation site (aef.com).

Lots of early praise for ADLAND

2009-09-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

"An engrossing tour of a revolution that is unlikely to be televised...Othmer wields his pen like a stiletto..." --CNN/Money.com

"Advertising is an industry like any other, except it changes our planet daily. James Othmer, one of my favorite writers, takes you inside that world and makes the people and places real. You can dislike these guys, but you can't ignore them. They make sure of that." --Seth Godin, author, TRIBES

"Funny, clever, irreverent, gossipy, and surprisingly insightful about advertising, human nature, and the postmodern business world. VERDICT For anyone interested in a career in advertising, this is essential reading...In highly enlivening style, Othmer offers astute assessments of the world of business." --Library Journal, (starred review)

"A great resource for anyone whose professional life makes them want to sing the from theme song from Alfie." --Sharon Glassman, The Huffington Post

“With a unique blend of humor and insight, Othmer guides us through this rapidly changing business and lets us see the direction in which it is headed. A must read for any student of advertising. -- Rick Boyko, Director, VCU Brandcenter

"A terrific introduction to what advertising has been and what it is becoming, a memoir-manifesto with warmth and insight, and a must-read for those contemplating entering the industry." --Max Barry, author of COMPANY and JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

"For nearly half a century, David Ogilvy’s CONFESSIONS OF AN ADVERTISING MAN has served as the Old Testament for an industry. Now there’s a new one: James Othmer’s ADLAND...Othmer describes the art of commerce with the insight of an insider and the bemusement of a novelist.” --Robert Thompson
Professor of Popular Culture, Syracuse University

"What Upton Sinclair did for meatpacking, Jim Othmer has done for advertising -- only with far more humor and far less (physical) horror. ADLAND is destined to become a classic of its kind -- a must read for anyone brave (or insane or aimless) enough to toil in the fields of modern advertising."
-- Daniel H. Pink, author of A WHOLE NEW MIND

"James P. Othmer is one of the funniest writers at work today. Period. His keen eye for the absurdities of the modern world rivals the likes of George Saunders and Sam Lipsyte. You could sharpen knives on Othmer's sentences. Prior to his 2006 debut novel, The Futurist, he was honing his mad skills in the advertising racket, as an exec at Young & Rubicam. And though I daresay it was a colossal waste of his talents, I, for one, am glad he endured it, or we wouldn't have Adland, a hilarious and insightful chronicle of the rise and fall of a modern ad man." -Jonathan Evison, author of ALL ABOUT LULU and WEST OF HERE

"I've been in advertising more than twenty years and spent countless hours trying to tell people how insane and hilarious and exciting and pointless and fascinating it all is. Now all I have to do is hand them this book." -Jamie Barrett, Creative Director/Partner Goodby Silverstein & Partners, SF

“Othmer’s struggle to do the next right thing in a business predicated on greed, lust, envy and sloth makes for an enlightening as well as entertaining read.”
-Steffan Postaer, Chairman & Chief Creative Officer, Euro RSCG Chicago, Author, The Happy Soul Industry

"It takes a real writer to turn the farce into prose and yet keep a true perspective that allows the great moments to shine through. Having worked with Jim on farce, fantasy and some fantastic creative – I for one was mesmerized by our own doings – I have no doubt you will be too” – David Sable, Vice Chairman, COO, Wunderman Worldwide

"Othmer captures the authentic, raw and visceral feel of the advertising world, and actually makes it wildly entertaining. He never forgets it's not science, it's all about the people. Bravo. " --Mark Dowley, Partner, Endeavor

"Othmer tells it like it plays out every day and how it's probably going to play out tomorrow... with a sweet blend of sarcasm, sincerity and biting humor that makes you think "Is advertising really that bad? And if it is, how can I get in?" --Desmond Hall, SVP, Executive Creative Director, Global Hue

"I loved it...required reading for my team. Not only is Othmer a truly fresh engaging writer, he is digging at the truth in his own career with crisp intensity and coming to insight after insight in a way that helps all of us as we go forward as well."
-Pip Coburn, author, The Change Function, founder of Coburn Ventures, former Global Technology Strategist, UBS

"A wry and insightful look at the insanity that is advertising...A must read for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes into creating an ad."
--David Griffith, Creative Director, Team Digital

“Hysterically entertaining. It’s the best overview of advertising I’ve ever read. A must-read for all clients, students and anyone who’s ever been in the trenches.”
--Jeff Griffith, Co-founder, Creative Director, Jugular

From the Intro to Adland

2009-09-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

My friends and I put together a short video based on the introduction to ADLAND, available on September 15.

Hope you enjoy, and that you'll share with others:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHAyskfW6sU

Special thanks to the excellent Director/Art Director Kleber Menezes, Composer extraordinaire Joey Spallina at Tonefarmer and Tracy Spinney for the tasty VO.

Starred Library Journal Review for ADLAND

2009-09-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

*Advertising veteran Othmer weathered a couple of decades on the creative side of the field before throwing in the portfolio to write this book. Admen are known not only for their creativity but for their quirkiness and iconoclasm as well, and this book clearly demonstrates the best traits of the trade: it's funny, clever, irreverent, gossipy, and surprisingly insightful about advertising, human nature, and the postmodern business world. Othmer's novel, The Futurist, was acclaimed for its biting wit and satire, which are evident here as the author chronicles his rise from bricklayer to muckety-muck on the creative side of a renowned agency and his trip out the back door again to the real world. VERDICT For anyone interested in a career in advertising, this is essential reading—at least to know what one is in for. But the book's relevance goes well beyond any sort of career preview or critique. In highly enlivening style, Othmer offers astute assessments of the world of business.—Carol J. Elsen, Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater Lib.

Focus-Grouped Thoughts on the Branded Page

2009-09-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

When the international book trade publication Publishing Perspectives wanted to discuss the relationship between books and branding, it sought out the biggest sell out of them all:

http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=5014
Focus-Grouped Thoughts on the Branded Page
By James P. Othmer

MAHOPAC, NEW YORK: Writing this sentence is a brazen, deliberate and irrevocable act of branding.

Trust me, before it (and all subsequent vowels and consonants below) was written, it was parsed, focus-grouped and post-mortemed by twelve angry, bookish consumers on the shiny side of a two-way mirror in Teaneck, New Jersey. To wit, they were asked:

Will it harm or enhance the author’s reputation?

Does the author have even have a reputation?

On one hand, wouldn’t writing so blatantly about commerce — comparing art, a book or an author to a brand! — alienate him from the high-brow MacArthur Fellowship club to which he aspires, not to mention put him at the top of Naomi Klein’s black list?

Yet on the other, his latest book is about the past, present and future of the advertising business to which he briefly (20 years is brief in the grand scheme of things) sold his soul. So it sort of makes sense, right?

This is all being shared, of course, in the spirit of the bane and beauty of 21st century social media branding: transparency.

So, as the author of the forthcoming book Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet (published in September by Doubleday in the US) when asked by Publishing Perspectives to share my thoughts about branding books, authors, publishers and booksellers, here’s what the marketing team behind “Brand Me” is allowing me to say.

AUTHORS: I recommend first taking the David Littell/John Updike Test…

Ask yourself the following: Have I recently signed a multi-million dollar contract? Do I have a five-decade legacy of literary success?

If you answer “yes” to either of the above, or if you’re independently wealthy, or fully embracing the starving artist life, it is perfectly acceptable to say “The promoting of one’s books is beneath me,” and/or “That is not my job. It is the job of my publisher.” For emphasis, you can even jab your finger at the full page New York Times ad with the picture of you pensively considering the universe.

If you answered “no,” I look forward to reading your witty and substantive blog, seeing your provocative and original trailer on Youtube, and watching your smart and entertaining Twitter posts appear with bold frequency and continued relevance as pub date approaches. I hear writing essays isn’t a bad idea, either.

PUBLISHERS: If Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are featured on consecutive spreads in your seasonal catalog, the concept of promoting your company to the general public as one that stands for a certain unified sensibility is not recommended. Same applies to publishers of William Vollmann and Danielle Steel. It will just confuse us. However, if your imprint only publishes books about religion, specific subgenres of sex, superheroes, ornithology or really good fiction, you are indeed special. Embrace that which makes you special and take it to the branding hilt.

However, there is a place for the mainstream publisher of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney to promote its brand and that is to the people who sell their books. People for whom it’s important to know that if it’s a Widget Press book, it will be of a certain production, promotion and content standard, it will be published with passion and originality and backed by a knowledgeable, diligent and conscientious sales force. Then go ahead and carry through on that.

Also, publishers, feel free to Tweet. Just remember that a litany of 140 character posts that say Buy this hot/sexy/hilarious/depressing new book is not the best way to engage humans and build a loyal following. Tell us something interesting about something other than your product. Or at least sell your brand more provocatively. What celeb just walked out of which senior editor’s office. Who’s sleeping with whom in marketing? If gossip is not your thing, think of your home page as a content channel for essays, industry (but not only yours) news, jokes, entertainment and videos, and think of Twitter as a way to steer people there.

BOOKSELLERS: You may get branding better than anyone in publishing.

Independent booksellers realize that their store is their brand. The way it’s decorated. The music they play. The way in which the titles on the front table or Website are curated. The way they use Twitter to share information about what’s selling, what’s going on in the industry and even which author is saying what in their store at this very second. They realize that simply saying “come shop here” isn’t enough.

One of my favorite pieces of bookstore branding is for a store that hasn’t even opened yet, 60 miles from my home, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It’s for Greenlight Bookstore. For several months the owners have been giving Twitter and Facebook updates about their endeavor — the admirable and brave opening of an Indie in this market — including architectural drawings and construction updates about things like sheetrock and insulation. Even though they probably don’t think of it this way, it’s branding. Because of the compelling nature of their story, and the transparent way in which they’re sharing it, I’m following and rooting for them.

As well as for anyone who realizes that the best form of branding is to do it truly and authentically, and to tell a story that people actually want to hear and become a part of. In other words, be your own focus group.

Huffington Post: "Madmen meets Monty Python"

2009-08-29T13:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-glassman/what-is-work-balancing-cr_b_270406.html

What is Work? Balancing Creativity and Cash

By Sharon Glassman

James P. Othmer is an ex full-time-ad guy turned full-time author.
Or maybe he's an ad guy turned author between full-time jobs?
No one can say. Least of all, James Othmer.
But it sort of doesn't matter. Because however the future plays out, Othmer has found his personal happiness in the here-and-now, writing for - and about - work.
After writing two work-related novels, Othmer has written a work of non-fiction that examines the What's, Hows and Why's of advertising.
He doesn't have an axe to grind, just a magnifying glass wielded with affection. And he's a whiz with a fact and a pencil. All of which makes Adland (Doubleday, September 15) a really fun read, in a Mad Men meets Monty-Pythonesque way.
"Would you make cigarette ads?" he writes in the book's opening pages. "Would you make cigarette ads if they had huge "YOU WILL DIE IF YOU SMOKE THESE!" warnings plastered across the bottom? Would you do antismoking ads paid for by big tobacco?"
In a less postmodern decade, Adland might have functioned on one level, as an informative and education insider's tale of a volatile industry.
But today, when so many industries have adopted advertising's "here today, screwed tomorrow" playbook, Othmer's story has dual appeal - as a portrait of a changing industry and a template for readers torn between a drive for professional success and a pull toward human happiness.
This makes Adland and James Othmer a great resource for anyone whose professional life makes them want to sing the from theme song from Alfie:
James and I spoke during his working summer vacation. He offered these tips for anyone trying to find their true career, and balance creative passions with paychecks:
Discover What You Want to Be When You Grow Up:
In the old days, tomorrow was something that happened after today. In the new work model, we can make choices about what we'll be doing tomorrow. A great way to know if you're on the right track is to ask:

Do I want to do what my boss is doing?
If the answer is yes, congratulations! Keep going.
If the answer is no, Othmer advises going "off on a ramble" while you keep your day job.
Test-drive an activity that you've always dreamed of doing. Like being a pastry chef (take a course) or leading outdoor tours (enroll in a few).
Ramble with the full passion you'd bring to that kind of career. The emotional shift in focus may allow you to earn your living in one way while finding fulfillment in another - or it may lead you to a new career entirely.
Don't Measure Your Creative Success in Dollars
After Othmer wrote his first novel, his agent was so sure it would sell - and sell big - that she took him to a lavish sushi lunch to celebrate the bidding auction she was sure would follow. High on sushi and praise, Othmer awaited the auction - and the riches that would prove he was a literary success.

There was just one problem: no one bid on his book.
Othmer got a short, sharp lesson from that experience: "Don't go to the lunch."
The only part of the creative process that he can control was the creative, he decided. And so he set out to write a book he truly loved, assuming it would be never published.
Once again, he was proved half-right. The book he wrote delighted him. And it ended up getting published, too.
He continues to write this way, and loves it.
"I have a great agent and a great publisher who believes in me."
And most important: he believes in what he's doing.
"I get great satisfaction from writing," he says.
Become your own Futurist.
A friend of Othmer's called him to say she was sure she was going to be let go from her job.
But that didn't mean her career was over, he insisted.
The key to finding a new career you love with the skills you have? Imagine you're looking five years into the future. What big business trends can you imagine? How might your "old" skills fit into these new models? Now work backwards and seek out the companies who need that "new" you.
Fire Yourself (Mentally)
Imagine you've been let go. What is the first thing you're going to do? Othmer asks.
Who will you call?
What will you search for first in your address book?
These people, actions and first ideas can offer you great clues to next career steps that your normal mind may be ignoring.
Another way to bridge the gap between creative satisfaction and income is humor.
Recently, Othmer told me, he was audited by the IRS. Uncle Sam refused to believe he could travel as much as he did to research his books and make so little money from them.
There was no way a person would work full-time to for so long for little return, the audit implied. And that stung.
"It's kind of insulting the way writing and creativity is looked at," Othmer admitted.
But James Othmer had the facts on his side. He went into his attic and pulled out five novel drafts and three folders of almost-yes letters, sorry-but-no letters and maybe-sort of letters and brought them downtown.
At which point even the IRS had to admit. Othmer was working his brains out. He might not be earning the big bucks for his work as he had before. But he was working in a job that made him professionally and personally happy. And no one, not even the IRS, could tax that.

"Middle Managers Should Write More Books" --Kevin Fenton

2009-08-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

From Kevin Fenton's excellent blog On Message.

http://kevinfentonbiz.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/middle-managers-should-write-more-books-thoughts-on-james-p-othmer%E2%80%99s-adland/

On Message
Middle managers should write more books: Thoughts on James P. Othmer’s Adland
2009 August 24
by Kevin Fenton
James P. Othmer’s Adland is a humble book and you should buy and read it precisely because it is a humble book.
In its humility, it is an absolutely essential antidote to much of what currently passes itself off as thought leadership. It is the opposite of guru speak.
You can’t swing a dead paradigm these days without hearing advertising being dismissed. The problem with this isn’t that advertising isn’t guilty of any number of sins– ranging venality to inanity–which could plausibly justify its dismissal. The problem is that the people who feel the need to dismiss advertising also feel the need to distort advertising to the point of parody.
A recent blog post which otherwise seriously attempted to discuss the viability of the advertising concept of the Big Idea in the age of small media invoked Don Draper as a representative of contemporary advertising. To restate: a recent blog invoked a fictional character from 1961 as representative of actual advertising in 2009. This is a little like someone attempting to enter the health care debate by referencing Doc on Gunsmoke. (The sad thing is, I think there may have been a point beneath the parody.)
Here’s the deal: if I don’t trust your descriptions, I don’t trust your prescriptions.
I trust Othmer’s descriptions. It is not that Adland paints a happy picture of advertising. The industry Othmer describes features a sadly recognizable mix of foot-dragging and bandwagon jumping, ethical queasiness and intermittent inspiration.
The triumph of Adland is that he writes about his own experience in large old-line agencies with honesty and detail. In these passages, he writes as what we used to call a “do-ru”–i.e., as someone actually responsible for doing work.
He switches from memoirist to journalist, making a valiant effort to talk to the actual people doing the actual work that is contemporary advertising. He gets out there into the trenches. Is it his fault that the trenches in this case are conference rooms with lemon fizzy water and really good bagels?
He writes about a 2000 pitch in which Y and R –venerable or vestigial, depending on your perspective–scrambled to keep an account in the-then nascent digital age. He writes about what it is like to do a big commercial shoot on the beaches of Normandy and in post apartheid South Africa. He describes the feeling of trying to please a roomful of vulgar millionaires who have made their millions selling fried chicken. He takes the now received idea that the average consumer is bombarded with three figures worth of messages a day and catalogs his actual experience as a recipient of messages over the course of twenty four hours. He visits Leo Burnett, the people who gave us Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Dough Boy; he also visits the people who gave us the Subservient Chicken and the amazingly successful viral campaign for Trent Reznor.
In its humility Adland does precisely what George Orwell said writing should do in Politics and the English Language. He refuses slippery, self-serving abstractions. (Some readers may wish for Othmer to tease an ethical system out of his experience. I didn’t. For that. there’s John O’Toole’s The Trouble With Advertising.) He insists on language that describes recognizable, compromised, nuanced, sometimes cheery reality.
You might still dismiss advertising. Othmer did. He quit the business to become a novelist and journalist.
But you will dismiss the industry as it actually exists, not as the punchline at a social media conference.
Available Sept 15. Shout out to @commongoodbooks for the Advance Reader’s Copy

Ghosts in the Floorboards or, Did the Curse of the Bambino Start in My Home?

2009-08-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Most of our house was built in the early 1800s (a slab of granite on the front stoop has 1819 or 1813 etched into it), but over the years a series of renovations have taken place. For instance, the kitchen is said to have been moved from across the street and attached to the main structure in the late 1800s. More recently, since moving here in 1990, we've done two substantial renovations or, really, restorations.

During phase one we found some interesting things, most notably stacks of newspaper sheets that lay flat under the original floorboards in the upstairs rooms, presumably for insulation and to muffle creaking underfoot.

One of my favorites is a local paper from April 6, 1888 (above) out of Croton Falls, NY, which seems to have been more of a metropolis 121 years ago than the modest train stop it is today. We've had it framed and hang it in our halls.

Not as easy on the eyes yet far more intriguing are two tiny slips of paper found amongst the newspapers (also above). The two pages, each 2x3 inches, were part of a pocket calendar from February 1907. At the head of each page, written in pencil, is the note "Misc. suggestions". To understand why this is interesting, let me provide a bit more context: back in 1991 a yellow Cadillac with Nebraska plates pulled into our driveway. A heavy man in his late 60s got out. He told me that he grew up here in the 1930s and 1940s, when there was no running water or electricity. He pointed to the enormous stone foundation of a barn on our property and told us that it burned to the ground during a fire on New Year's Eve, 1933. He told us that our pool was built in 1930 and that the owner used a telegraph in the upstairs office for up to the minute weather reports before giving the okay to commence pouring the concrete.

Then, before the stranger left, never to be seen or heard from again after promising to send us photos that never came, he said this: "Of course you know that the man who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees lived here: Harry Frazee." I didn't know this, but was intrigued. Having been a sportswriter who worked at the Boston Globe for several years, I was well acquainted with Frazee, who was a former owner of the Boston Red Sox and a Broadway theatrical producer, and of course with the Curse of the Bambino.

Everyone agrees that Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees at the end of the 1919 season. Some say he needed the money ($100k in cash) to finance his production of the musical "No No Nanette". Others say he just needed money. Curiously, the White Sox had previously offered him Shoeless Joe Jackson and $60k for Ruth, but the 1919 Black Sox scandal put the kibosh on that.

For several years after the stranger left I thought about Harry Frazee and Babe Ruth, but with time, and no further word or photographic evidence, I let it go. Then, during a late 1990s renovation, while tearing up floorboards in the office in which I now write, I found the tiny 1907 "Misc. Suggestions" paper scraps. One sheet contains these written notes: "playing several characters" and "(takes?) off clothes and hurls them down" and "theater patagonian" and "-----oplasm, a grand word." Cryptic, to be sure, but clearly some kind of theatrical notes.

According to Internet Broadway Data Base (IBDB), Frazee was born in 1888; his first producer credit was for the 1911 musical "Madame Sherry." This means he would have been about 26 when he lived here. If he lived here.

A cursory search at the town records office only took us back to the 1950s. To track the deed back to Frazee and the early 1800s I'll have to spend a day at the county offices. Something to look forward to. Even for a lifelong Mets fan.

Will your book trailer go viral or languish in the digital void?

2009-08-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

@jamespothmer: Rather than trailers we should think in terms of video provocations."

Late Monday night I innocently Tweeted the line above in response to a query about what makes a good book trailer. Minutes later, @ronhogan of Media Bistro's Galley Cat blog, re-Tweeted my post, with the tag, "Preach it brother James!" This led to a flurry of interesting 140s and re-140s on the subject, with Hogan artfully steering the dialogue. The next day, I saw that Hogan had cut and pasted some of my Tweets into the lede of his Galley Cat Post:

How Will Your Book Trailer Upend Readers' Expectations?

"We can do better than poorly produced B- and C-level movie-esque trailers," ad-man-turned-novelist James P. Othmer argued during a discussion last night on Twitter. Because of budget limitations, he continued, the "conventional" plot summary book trailer "looks cheap" when compared to movie trailers; a provocation, on the other hand, "sheds light on a truth [or] issue." What Othmer calls a 'provocation,' we might also call an 'engagement,' and it's that slight shift in vocabulary that helped us recognize how Othmer's theory held up for trailers promoting fiction as well as nonfiction."

Of course every book is different and there's much more to be said on the subject. But Hogan's right: with any form of digital communication, engagement is the key. In the online world, if your message is engaging or provocative enough it will be shared, forwarded, posted, re-Tweeted, discussed and linked-to. If it's not, if it's trite, predictable or anything less than something viewers will want to tell others about, it will languish unwatched in the digital void.

Outtake from fake commerical for imaginary product, for soon to be published, presumably real, book.

2009-08-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

This is hard to explain. But here goes. To help me promote ADLAND and hopefully help get himself a well-deserved, amazing job, recent VCU Brandcenter grad Shane Knight is putting together a (for lack of a better word) commercial for the book. Or, rather, a commercial for an imaginary pharma product that was described in the book. Actually, the commercial isn't so much about the product as it is a dramatization of its disturbing side effects.

After some discussion, Shane has decided to go the rare, time-consuming yet hilarious claymation route. This photo is from the screen and wardrobe test. He hopes to start shooting ASAP and have the piece posted within the next week or so. To see more of Shane's work check out dirtyfilthyfreedom.com

Mad Men then vs. Now from Sunday's

2009-08-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

Skip Past the Ads, But You're Still Being Sold

By James P. Othmer
Sunday, August 16, 2009

In the 1960s Madison Avenue era, painstakingly re-created in the cult hit television show "Mad Men," which returns Sunday for its third season, advertisers could buy a fixed block of airtime on television and be guaranteed a captive audience. That's what Winston cigarettes did for the inaugural season of "The Flintstones" in 1960; cartoon-loving prospective smokers tuned in to see Fred and Barney gleefully puffing away, shilling the product.

But now if we don't like an ad, we can zap, TiVo and DVR it into consumer oblivion. If it truly offends -- say we discover it is fake or untruthful -- we can trash the brand on our blogs or write nasty comments under the spot on YouTube.

On the other hand, if we're entertained enough by something a brand does, we can do its job for it -- by becoming its social media champion. That's what millions of people do every day. They "elf" themselves for OfficeMax each holiday season, spreading the word about discount paper products while having online fun in Santa's workshop. They forward Cadbury's "gorilla playing drums" video to anyone who likes to see a primate jam. A few years ago, they had their way with a man in a chicken suit with Burger King's "subservient chicken," which had 25 million visitors during its first 48 hours online.

And in the past few weeks, hundreds of thousands -- including seemingly every ad person I know -- have been playing along with AMC's ramp-up for Sunday's premiere, joining a "Mad Men Casting Call" and flocking to the meta social-media promotion "Mad Men Yourself," which lets people swap their Facebook profile pics for hip "Mad Men" avatars.

Ads in the "Mad Men" day were about the art of persuasion. Advertising today is about the art of engagement.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at the epicenter of advertising yet-to-come, the Brandcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. During a two-day visit there I never saw a single idea in the medium that had been advertising's delivery system of choice since the days of, well, Don Draper: the 30-second network television commercial.

Instead, I saw discreetly branded viral video shorts, graphic novels and performance art. I saw Facebook and Twitter campaigns for mega-brands, and real-world scavenger hunts and online interaction with fictional characters. It didn't seem like the industry in which I'd worked for more than 20 years. When I left advertising in 2005, every major campaign still revolved around the almighty TV spot.

And this isn't happening only at VCU. For two years I visited many of the most progressive idea factories for the $670 billion-a-year global industry. Everything revolved around viral, immersive, "360 degree" advertising, with nary a martini or a TV spot in sight.

On the surface this seems pretty good, this two-way digital transparency model that seemingly makes it incumbent upon advertisers to step up the truthfulness and entertainment value of their messages. Indeed, many smarter agency-guided brands already get this and have thrived because of it. At the very least, it's much less harmful than the loosely regulated, sex-in-the-ice-cubes booze and cigarette ads churned out by the chain-smoking, sublime persuaders of the 1950s and '60s, right?

Not quite. Because while we now have the ability to assert more control over advertising, we're unwillingly being bombarded by more messages than ever, infiltrating our lives in new and increasingly insidious ways.

The market research firm Yankelovich estimates that the average American living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day. Today, estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000 ad impressions a day. To hone in on a more accurate number, one would have to determine what exactly constitutes an ad in today's ambiguous media environment. Print, radio, TV and online pop-up and banner ads are easy to tally. But what about Internet search results, recommendations on Amazon, subtle product placements in film, music and TV, and, of course, spam?

Then there's the blogosphere, where an entire cottage industry blurs the line between content and advertising, truth and spin.

This month, it was revealed that pharmaceutical companies had hired ghostwriters with no medical training to produce and disseminate "research papers" for online public consumption. Before the drug companies were the mommy bloggers -- parents writing about their children, and their children's favorite products, online. That scandal exposed an ethically tenuous relationship in which bloggers received corporate swag, and in some instances vacation junkets, in exchange for favorable, seemingly honest reviews and "content" mentions. And the brands are not shy about it. Jill Beraud, a marketing officer at PepsiCo, is on record saying that courting the mommy bloggers is a long-term effort.

The Federal Trade Commission has responded by proposing that all bloggers and the corporations that sponsor them be held accountable for the validity of the claims they make. The agency is updating its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials for first time since 1980. Good luck with that. And by that I mean assigning a task force to tackle First Amendment issues and police the entire digital universe to see if someone's passionate Huggies recommendation on MommyBloggest.com is on the up and up.

Meanwhile, members of Congress alarmed by the creeping ubiquity of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing (the United States and New Zealand are the only developed nations to permit such ads) have taken steps to rein in the people who bombard us with ads that are often accompanied by 30 seconds of legal copy about side effects including death and blindness.

In 50 years we've gone from loosely regulated advertising based on the art of persuasion, to more regulated, perfectly legal and often spectacular ads based on the art of engagement, to anything goes.

As a result, it is increasingly difficult to determine what is authentic. It is impossible to tell if a cool video clip is just that or an ad for a car, sneaker or cellphone. Is that really an environmentally responsible vehicle, or is the message pure greenwash? Is that really an unaffiliated "concerned citizen" stepping up to speak at a town hall meeting with Rockwellian authenticity, or a paid party hack who heeded the call of a social media networking blitz?

I recently spoke about all of this with a former colleague and current advertising creative director. "Eventually," he said, "the Internet always reveals the truth." The question is, when the messages come at us at the speed of light, many thousands of times a day, can it or anyone reveal it fast enough?

At its core, advertising is a tension between art, commerce and ethics. With time, consumers, brands and the law make adjustments and the balances shift. Which brings us back to 1962, and Don Draper. Would his contemporary self approve of mommy bloggers and pharma spam? Or would the man who in one episode frowned with disapproval at Doyle Dane Bernbach's revolutionary "Think Small" print ad for Volkswagen evolve and become a proponent of ethical, engaging ads?

For an answer, cue the DVR to Season One, Episode Six -- skip the ads -- when a beatnik says to Draper: "You work in advertising. . . . How do you sleep at night?"

The Mad Man's response: "On a bed made of money."

CNN.com: "an engrossing tour of a revolution that is unlikely to be televised"

2009-08-13T12:15:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a creative
Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet
By James P. Othmer
Doubleday, 336 pages, $26.95

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted," observed John Wanamaker, the 19th-century department store magnate. "The trouble is, I don't know which half."

Probably more than half gets wasted today, but can anyone tell for sure? Marketing strategies have evolved at a breakneck pace during the past few decades. Advertising veteran James Othmer had front-row seats for many of the changes. His new book, Adland, is an engrossing tour of a revolution that is unlikely to be televised.

Othmer's career began when the business was not so very far from the one portrayed in Mad Men and Bewitched. It ended in the age of cyberspace. He learned that the future of marketing belongs not to yesteryear's martini-swilling pitchmen but to some combination of the young, the Asian, the digital, the cellular -- and to things we might not recognize today as ads in the first place.

Othmer, who also wrote the well-received comic novel The Futurist, meanders a bit in Adland, but more often he wields his pen like a stiletto. Recalling his days at a major ad firm, he says that "asking an agency like ours to do nontraditional advertising was like asking Dick Cheney to be a contestant on -- and win -- Dancing With the Stars."

Although Othmer doesn't prescribe marketing strategies for today's economy, he does paint a vivid portrait of advertising "creatives," a species that every entrepreneur will meet sooner or later and that is therefore worth studying in its native habitat. Think of the author as your very own Audubon, capturing his colorful subjects in flight.
By Daniel Akst

Media Bistro Morning Media Menu Podcast: Welcome to Adland

2009-08-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

Adland the life begat The Futurist the novel begat Adland the book.

2009-08-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

Video trailer like object for the paperback of The Futurist, directed and edited by the talented Luca Dipiero. For those who have asked, Reason Pictures, which also owns GOOD magazine, holds the film rights to The Futurist and is making some nice progress toward making it happen.

On the NYT Blog: Should Pharma ads be Reined In?

2009-08-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times asked me to weigh in on pharma advertising's risks and absurdities for its "Room for Debate" blog. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/should-prescription-drug-ads-be-reined-in/So far, more than 300 people have weighed in with comments as well, with about 296 of them agreeing that pharma ads have gone too far. So, not really much of a debate. More of a call to action.

Also, I always learn something from comments and re-posts of a blog piece. This time it was from the actual sufferers of Restless Leg Syndrome. Several (4? 5?) were pissed at the way my lede made light of their condition, and they're right. The affliction is real and painful and non uncommon. I apologize for making light of this.
However, I still think the name RLS is unfortunate at best, and the side effects of increased sexual urges and gambling are absurd and exemplify the ridiculousness of the pharma ad genre. So RLS is a real and painful affliction. So, unfortunately, is the marketing behind it. Anyway, on to the piece:

LOSE THE ADS AND TELL -- DON'T ASK -- YOUR DOCTOR
by James P. Othmer

My all-time favorite pharmaceutical ad is for something called R.L.S. (Restless Leg Syndrome) a condition whose degree of absurdity is topped only by a drug’s potential side effects: “Tell your doctor if you experience increased gambling, sexual or other urges.”

Makes one wonder how many evenings that began watching the evening news with a bit of cappuccino-induced leg bouncing — something as innocent as, say, keeping time to the Mirapex jingle — ended in a Vegas hotel room with a bankrupt R.L.S. sufferer snorting coke with a transsexual hooker. “Well, I lost every cent of my 401(k) nest egg, and my marriage, and I caught a rare S.T.D. But at least I no longer have that irritating leg bouncing up and down thingy.”

Make ads that simply say, if you don’t feel well, go tell — don’t ask — your doctor.

If I had a dime for every time I heard the words “ask your doctor” or saw a crude clip of phallic imagery during a commercial break from the evening news, or was forced to contemplate a stomach-turning side effect, I’d be able to afford my own health care.

Close

In fact, relying upon network news pharmaceutical ads as a cultural touchstone, a recent visitor to our planet would think that when we are young our legs can’t stop moving, that we menstruate four times a year, and we are ravaged by S.T.D.’s (despite taking great measures not to get pregnant), and we are extremely depressed; when we’re middle-aged we desperately want to get pregnant but can’t, perhaps because most men can’t achieve an erection (despite the fact that many others are afflicted with four-hour “reactions”), and we are also bald, overweight and extremely depressed; and when we’re old we are arthritic, forgetful, still depressed, riddled with cancer and either can’t urinate at all or pee so much we have to wear diapers.

The United States and, for some reason, New Zealand, are the only developed countries where direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is legal. According to a recent York University report, in 2004 pharmaceutical companies spent twice as much on advertising and promotion ($59.5 billion) in the U.S. as they did on research and development. I’m convinced that if you invented a syndrome — Occasionally Twitchy Toe Syndrome (O.T.T.S.) — and put $2.5 billion in air time behind it, a market would arise overnight.

So, instead of making ads that play off our fears, anxieties and neuroses, for products that need 30 seconds of legal copy for side effects that include death and blindness, not to mention a questionable F.D.A. situation, for syndromes you’ve never heard of, but sound kind of, you know, familiar, how about this: make ads that simply say, if you don’t feel well, go tell — don’t ask — your doctor.

And while they’re at it, it would be nice if the same lawmakers who recently proposed scrutinizing big pharmaceutical ads took a similar long hard look at the standards and practices of another dubious marketing genre: the political ad.

Video Intro for Adland

2009-07-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

My friends and I put together a short video based on the introduction to ADLAND. The book will be published September 15, same day as some dude named Dan Brown's book is coming out, so we figured we'd better get an early start.

Hope you enjoy, and that you'll share with others:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHAyskfW6sU

Special thanks to the excellent Director/Art Director Kleber Menezes, Composer extraordinaire Joey Spallina at Tonefarmer and Tracy Spinney for the tasty VO.

Ray Guns and Bagpipers: Get thee to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival

2009-07-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

For almost 20 years I've been watching the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (hvshakespeare.org) players make beautiful and silly magic on the highlands of the Hudson River. We get there early, picnic with Constitution Marsh below us and West Point rising up on the other side. The festival is held under a gorgeous new tent on the grounds of the Boscobel estate. According to the guide, "completed in 1808 for the States Dyckman family, Boscobel House is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of Federal architecture in the country.

Then there are the productions. Often they begin with several or all of the players coming over the rise across the field at dusk with the Hudson Highlands behind them. Sometimes they break out into dance numbers. Or lip-synching. Sometimes a character reads his lines with an exaggerated Bronx or Western accent. Sometimes a soldier will carry an antique sword as well as a plastic ray-gun. And almost always, it works.

I say this not because they allow me to bring a full cup of the adult beverage of my choice to my seat, or because they allow me to refill said cup at intermission. I say this because, in addition to having fun with the material and taking full advantage of the spectacular environment, the actors give tremendous, true-to-the-material performances.

For those uninitiated to Shakespeare, or slightly buzzed, or both (guilty!) the first ten minutes or so of every performance can be disconcerting. The language is pure Willy S., the sets under the tent are usually minimal, and this is often when a lot of the seemingly complex backstories are shared. But not to worry. Somehow, around minute eleven, something strange happens. Some kind of primal Elizabethan decoder switches on in my brain and suddenly it all begins to make sense. The language, the plots, the ray guns.

Two of my favorite HVSF performances have been The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. So far this year I've seen an excellent rendition of Pericles, replete with a jousting match and an R&B lip-sync number, and, last week, a Much Ado About Nothing that somehow managed to make ray guns and bag pipes and Buck Rogers-like backpack torches seem like perfectly suitable props. This year's third repertory performance is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). I'm looking forward to it.
Hope to see you there.

hvshakespeare.org

David Sable, Vice Chairman of Wunderman Worldwide, on ADLAND

2009-07-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

"Working in advertising can often be like the worst of reality TV – it’s like 'Survivor', 'Deadliest Catch' and 'The Apprentice' rolled up into one - and that’s on a good day. It takes a real writer to turn the farce into prose and yet keep a true perspective that allows the great moments to shine through. Having worked with Jim on farce, fantasy and some fantastic creative – I for one was mesmerized by our own doings – I have no doubt you will be too” – David Sable, Vice Chairman, COO, Wunderman Worldwide

Adventures in Solar on a Sunless Planet

2009-06-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

It has rained almost every day since I decided to use the power of the sun to heat our 80 year-old, 75,000 gallon, concrete swimming pool.

I was told that this would be a fairly easy project. Get the panels from a catalog, secure them to your roof, do some simple plumbing and you're in business. It's the green thing to do. It's the economical thing to do. It's also, it turns out, a crazy thing to do.

For starters, our pool is no where near a roof. So I had to build one. Forty feet long, 10 feet wide, pitched at 45 degrees on a sloping lawn. Also, simple geometry and math were involved, which means a certain numbers-challenged liberal arts major could often be seen sobbing in the rain, clutching a miter box, carpenter pencil and a square. Many post holes were dug and filled with concrete and pressure-treated 4x4s. A small forest was felled for them and the rest of the lumber. A larger one was also felled, eight towering ashes, to provide the necessary sunlight to heat the panels that would heat the water that would, someday, in theory, heat our pool.

In case you haven't noticed, these haven't been the sunniest of times in the northeast.

Regarding the trees: they were ash, and fairly messy. Plus, once I spend the rest of the summer splitting their logs, I'll have close to two cords of wood, which I'll burn this winter, which will save on the heating bill and reduce our reliance on foreign oil. Of course, it also means toxic woodsmoke will be spewing from our chimney from November until March. It's complicated, folks.

There were several mishaps, most quite funny to watch unless you happened to be the person getting popped in the nose by a rubber hose when the uncooperative couplings were being forced together, or the person who, having decided to use dishwasher detergent to make the coupling process easier, spilled a bit of soap in the rain (of course) and repeatedly fell on the wet, slick plastic panels pitched at a 45 degree angle. It's all quite funny, until someone slips and drill-guns a screw into his thumb. According to my children, that's when it becomes hilarious.

The good news: on Friday, my brother-in-law Chris, concerned over my mental and physical health, came by to make the final connections from the 18-panel, 450 square-foot rack to the pool filter. For a moment, it worked. Then two panels sprung leaks, no doubt the bi-product of being repeatedly dragged across rough plywood by a solitary, clumsy miserable bastard with soap on the soles of his shoes.

When the offending panels were replaced and bypassed we tried again. Within a minute, slightly less frigid water was being pumped into our pool.

On Saturday morning the temperature was a frosty 67 degrees. By Sunday afternoon we hit 74. Still shrinkage-inducing, so don't break out that Speedo just yet, but getting there.

So was it worth the money and time, the downing of trees, the truckload of lumber, the hole in my thumb, the knot on the bridge of my nose and and mosquito bites?

Was this a green act, or simply a money saving act, or the actions of someone neck deep in a mid-life crisis?

It's up to the sun to decide.

Paddling into the Past on Lake Mahopac

2009-06-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

This rare sunny morning I got my kayak out on Lake Mahopac for a quick paddle long before the jet skiers and wake boarders rolled out of bed. The lake is more than five miles in circumference and has three islands. I built my kayak six years ago out of marine mahogany from a kit by Pygmy boats in Washington State. It's not perfect and it took me much longer than it should have, and it's really made for sea touring, not lakes, but I love it.

This morning the lake was flat and the surface was covered with flotsam of tulip flowers that had fallen from trees on Canopus Island. Canopus was a Wappinger Indian Chief who supposedly died in a battle with British soldiers. Another Mahopac Indian legend has two ill-fated lovers jumping off a cliff to their deaths, but for the life of me, and I've circled this island for 45 years, I can't find a cliff high enough to kill someone.

In the late 1800's this was the place to be. City dwellers came to stay at grand hotels in summer, and in winter ice was harvested off the lake and shipped by train into New York City. At one point the political criminal Boss Tweed got involved in the development of the lake. He planned a national museum of art and science and a grand music hall. On July 4 1871 they had a huge celebration in Mahopac for the town that was yet to come, and is still yet to come. I wrote an entire unpublished novel about the Tweed debacle that I hope to revisit one day. Anyway, one by one the hotels burned, then something called refrigeration was invented, killing off the ice industry and also shifting the local dairy culture to more affordable lands upstate.

When I was a teenager in the 1970's the hotels were ruins and many of the houses, mostly summer cottages, had fallen into disrepair. My junior prom in 1977 was the last official event in the once famous Forest House Hotel. The last unofficial event was my brother's bachelor party several years later (his friend was caretaker until it was demolished). In the last ten years or so that has all changed. Now there are houses on the lake that cost in the millions and on weekends the water is filled with boats better suited for the ocean, towing kids on banana tubes. Not sure which Lake Mahopac I prefer.

One development that I like is the Frank Lloyd Wright home on Petra Island, photographed (above) as I approached it this morning. For decades the signed and stamped plans for it went un-executed. There was only a caretaker's cottage, designed by Wright, and briefly inhabited by my brother-in-law's brother in the late 1970s. Sometime in the '90s a local couple bought the island and the plans and set about making the house into a reality. There were fights from Wright's foundation, who wanted money, and from others. But they persevered and it got built. The owners don't live there. They mostly visit on weekends, commuting from their house on the nearby shore.

A Cannes-themed plug from Adrants

2009-06-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.adrants.com/2009/06/creative-director-searches-for-meaning.php

Creative Director Searches For Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet

Former Y&R CD James Othmer will publish a new book in September entitled ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet. Othmer describes the book as "a semi-memoir about the past present and future of advertising."

Since it's Cannes week, Othmer agreed to share a Cannes-related passage from the book. It's the first line from his chapter about Cannes 2008:

"The future of advertising is hunched over in the center of Boulevard de la Croisette outside a tiny yet unthinkably crowded cafe on the French Riviera at 4:18 AM, hands on tanned yet wobbly knees, uncertain whether she will succumb to the excesses her industry has bestowed upon her and puke, call it a night and stumble back to her overpriced, mega-agency-sponsored hotel room, or gather her wits, her stomach and her constitution and rally to take her skills to another, more exciting place where the party is just getting started."

Yup, things haven't changed much at all. The future of advertising is clear: awards, company-funded trips to exotic locales and lots and lots of alcohol.

Rebranding Tehran

2009-06-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

So in the wake of this week's election debacle in Iran, the population is outraged. The world is outraged. Twitterers around the planet expressed outrage over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's highly suspect election. Then, shockingly, out of Tehran, a heroic gesture. A powerful organization steps up to speak out.

This is where it gets interesting, and a little disappointing, at least from a branding perspective. The name of the organization that denounces the election?

The Association of Combatant Clergy.

The fact that it can easily be confused with The (no shit) Combatant Clergy Association is the least of its problems.

Not since Chevy launched the Nova (which translated to "No Go") in Latin America has a brand name lost as much during the crossing of borders. Or something.

"This meeting of the Association of Combatant Clergy is here by called to order. All rise and punch the cleric to your left in his combatant face. In the back, smiling and handing out complimentary Dunkin Munchkin's! Off with his head!"

This is what the world has to root for? Can't someone in Tehran or Adland do better?

If they don't want to seem too soft, they could at least try something like The Brotherhood of the Lesser of Two Evils.

Kind words and a tapas-sized excerpt of ADLAND from Three Guys One Book, and All About Lulu author Jonathan Evison

2009-06-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Adland – Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet
A sneak-peak courtesy of Bill Thomas at Doubleday.

JONATHAN EVISON: By way of a preamble, let me just say that James P. Othmer is one of the funniest writers at work today. Period. His keen eye for the absurdities of the modern world rivals the likes of George Saunders and Sam Lipsyte. You could sharpen knives on Othmer's sentences.

Prior to his 2006 debut novel, The Futurist, Jimbo was honing his mad skills in the advertising racket, as an exec at Young & Rubicam. And though I daresay it was a colossal waste of his talents, I, for one, am glad he endured it, or we wouldn't have Adland, a hilarious and insightful chronicle of the rise and fall of a modern ad man.

Here's a little taste of Adland, which will be released in September:
http://bit.ly/o0fUN

Kirkus on ADLAND

2009-06-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Kirkus 6.15 Issue

Othmer, James P.ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet

A former ad man delves into his 20 years in the slogan trenches, musing on how advertising influences us and how the Internet is revamping it.At some point, Othmer (The Futurist, 2006) probably made you buy something: a phone service, some cat litter, possibly fried chicken. To prompt that purchase, he might have spent weeks staging a pitch disguised as an Off-Broadway show, or days contemplating the difference between crispy and crunchy, or hours on a conference call discussing how kitty litter can make your cat’s poop shrink. In those moments, Othmer felt his soul was being corrupted. At other times he caught creative highs from being huddled in a meeting room thinking up ideas. Both experiences gave Othmer an understanding of advertising—the process, the positioning, the ultimate point of it all—that we consumers could never acquire on our own. His goal is to explain the business, from its conception in the focus-group meetings of a Chicago research institution to its dumbing-down at the hands of franchisees desiring a KFC commercial that borders on food porn. Othmer uses his often hilarious experiences to discuss the stress-fueled environment advertising springs from, how its message is targeted to consumers and how branding can actually be a good thing—even now, as traditional branding is collapsing. That last fact leads the author on a quest to understand advertising’s future, particularly online, and he interviews the heads of some of the biggest online marketing shops. To be a successful ad exec, he concludes, you have to understand new media and realize it is a galaxy of endless possibility that allows brands to interact and have a conversation with consumers—something a 30-second Super Bowl ad could never do.Othmer’s engaging dissection of advertising gives consumers valuable insight into how companies manipulate messages to convince us to give them our money.

Max Barry does not hate ADLAND

2009-06-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

This quote is significant because a) I have never met Max Barry, nor does he owe me money; b) Max Barry is not an advertising person but an acclaimed writer of excellent satirical fiction (JENNIFER GOVERNMENT, SYRUP and COMPANY; yes it is excellent satirical fiction with a business/marketing edge but it's way different than, say, WHO STOLE MY CHEESE?) and c) Max Barry is Australian!

"Othmer is a witty and charming tour guide who chats self-deprecatingly
about his own Adland epiphanies and humiliations while leading us
inexorably toward the birthing room of Advertising Next. A terrific
introduction to what advertising has been and what it is becoming, a
memoir-manifesto with warmth and insight, and a must-read for those
contemplating entering the industry."
--Max Barry, author of COMPANY and JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

Friday Night at the Strand: I am not worthy!

2009-05-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

This week is Book Expo America Week in NY. And Friday night I get to be a small but geekily excited part of it. Why? My publishers at Knopf Doubleday are having a cocktail party for press, booksellers and authors in the Rare Books Room upstairs at the awesome Strand Bookstore on 12th Street.

What the hell am I doing on this list?

LIDIA BASTIANICH
PHILIP CAPUTO
SUZAN COLÓN
PAT CONROY
RICHARD ELLIS
JAMES ELLROY
JASON EPSTEIN
MICHAEL GREENBERG
JUDITH JONES
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
JONATHAN LETHEM
PETER MAASS
THOMAS MALLON
VALERIE MARTIN
BEN MEZRICH
LORRIE MOORE
JAMES OTHMER
CARYL PHILLIPS
ABIGAIL POGREBIN
RICHARD RUSSO
PAUL SHAFFER
SHERYL WUDUNN

Another shrimp roll, Mr. Lethem? Freshen your drink Ms. Moore? Of course I don't mind getting your coat, Mr. Conroy and Ellroy and Russo.

I'll do my best to try to act as if I belong. And when that fails I'll probably just get all drunk and gushy and ask Ellroy to sign my mug shot.

Literary Landmarks II: Kurt Vonnegut, NYC

2009-05-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

Walking around midtown east today I took a picture of Kurt Vonnegut's townhouse. Kurt died two years ago last month. Brought back some cool memories, some of which I recounted in this piece for PW and the Virginia Quarterly Review

Othmer on Vonnegut: Kurt in a Storm
By James P. Othmer
April 16th, 2007

If you had to be out and about as a hurricane was bearing down on New York City, there were worse places to be than in the back of a limousine with Kurt Vonnegut. Especially if you were twenty-three years old and wanted to be a writer.

It was September of 1985 and we were driving through midtown Manhattan during the prelude to Hurricane Gloria. Storefronts were covered with plywood. Rain blew horizontally over streets that Kurt and I seemingly had to ourselves. This was my first job out of college, working as a publicity assistant for his publisher and I was, understandably, unnerved. My boss was a hurricane-induced no-show that morning and there was a full slate of morning show appearances to make. Plus, I had never been alone with a literary icon before. I had never been in a hurricane before.

But Kurt could not have been more relaxed. And why not? What’s a little rain and wind after you’ve lived through the Great Depression, survived being a prisoner of war, and the firebombing of Dresden?

On the way to our first interview he lit another one of the unfiltered Pall Malls that he was on record as saying he hoped would kill him. Then he looked outside and dryly said, “Maybe Jerry Falwell is right, and God is punishing New Yorkers for our countless sins.” We went to Good Morning This and AM That. People who I am sure had not read his book asked innocuous questions that he answered with a deadpan wit that was quite unmorningshow-like. The novel was Galapagos, and he had two minutes to share his vision on evolution and humanity, plot and themes. Two minutes for Kurt Vonnegut? I was outraged, but Kurt could not have appeared to care less.

Outside the rain fell harder. The winds reached upwards of eighty-five miles an hour. He smoked more Pall Malls. Before a remote for the top morning show in Canada, a makeup woman considered his face and wild curls of gray hair and she shrugged. Even his hair was hurricane-proof.

Kurt Vonnegut got a lot of mail. I know, because for two years I sorted it and delivered it to him at his East Side town house. This is before email and blogs. This is before reading groups and Oprah. Sometimes I would call first. Sometimes I’d just ring the doorbell, convinced that I was interrupting a thought that would forever change the shape of American letters. It was always a shock when he would answer and more of a shock when he would invite me inside. Kurt knew that I wanted to be a writer but I never had the nerve to ask him anything. After all, I saw the mail. Hundreds of letters and manuscripts from fans whose lives his words had changed, asking for advice, guidance, the coveted blurb. What could I possibly ask of him? His advice for writers, for human beings, was right there in his books, in the transcripts of his countless speeches to the college students who worshiped him.

What I didn’t know then is that he had tried to take his own life in 1984, soon after I had started working with him, not long before the day he had seemed so unflappable in the face of a Manhattan hurricane. Thankfully, he survived, and I’ve since read that one of the things he’s proudest of is not trying again. He thought it would make a bad example.

A few months after Hurricane Gloria I knocked on Kurt Vonnegut’s door and spoke to him one last time. I had the usual stack of letters and manuscripts. I was not afraid anymore. We’d been through the morning shows and a hurricane. After he took them from me I told him that I was leaving for another job and to try to make a go of it as a writer. For the first time I asked him to sign a book for me. When he was done scribbling in his wild hand he handed it back to me and gave me the best advice a writer could give another. “Write every day,” he said. We shook hands, and I imagine he went back to doing just that. The inscription in my book, which I am looking at right now, as I write this, says, “To my admirable colleague, Jim Othmer. Kurt Vonnegut, Christmas 1985.”

And so it goes.

Eff the Sun

2009-05-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

Funny video for sunscreen from ad students Shane Knight and Charlie Hodges et al at VCU Brandcenter. Shane is one of the recent VCU graduates (the other is the honorable James Wood) trying to crack the code on marketing ADLAND, thus saving publishing, advertising and my ass all at the same time. Somebody give these guys a job.

Twittering Books, Ads and Bare Knuckle Bouts with Literary Icons

2009-05-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

Should writers have a web page? A blog? If they made wanna-be viral videos showing them sitting at a desk reading from their book, would people watch? What about if the video showed a writer having a mixed martial arts bout in a steel cage with another writer or, better yet, a reviewer?

How about Twitter?

What's it do? How does it work? Does it work? And - let's cut to the chase - will it sell books?

Who knows?

Because I'm a novelist who happens to have spent twenty years in the adworld and is about to publish a book about, yes, advertising, I think too much about this kind of thing. I've dabbled in much of the above (though, truth be told, my run-in with Alice Munro did NOT involve a steel cage, it was a bare knuckle affair in the self-help stacks at the Strand...who knew that she knew aikido?) with mixed results.

I've all but abandoned my website jamespothmer.com, mostly because I don't understand flash technology, nor can I justify spending money to update something that is almost exclusively visited by relatives of Nigerian Princes and makers of magic pills that will "get my bedroom smelling like intimacy again."

This blog, on the other hand, seems to work just fine. Easy to update, easy to post and just as easy to ignore. It also plays well with my other social sites, such as Facebook and the subject of this post, Twitter.

I joined Twitter about a month or so ago, but only recently engaged in earnest. I was curious and skeptical and clueless. One of the first people I followed was MC Hammer, and then a bunch of people who like to accumulate followers mostly by posting about Twitter. I joined in part because I should sort of know about this stuff if I want to write about advertising, or contemporary fiction with words like futurist in the title.

The marketing people at Doubleday urged me to join as well. The motivation for the latter is clear: sell books, raise your profile, blah, blah, blah. These are good goals but explicitly leveraging one's presence on social media in an effort to sell books/music or even pills that smell like intimacy is a dangerous proposition. Especially books, because, well, bookpeople for the most part have more acute bullshit detectors and a lower tolerance for pimping than, say pharma people.

My favorite example of this is an online book group I'm a part of that originated on Myspace and has since moved to the more manageable and practical literary community Goodreads. It's a fantastic digital salon called Fiction Files Redux, run by novelist on the rise (ALL ABOUT LULU) Jonathan Evison, but self-policed by an exceptional core group of readers. Anyway, in the group rules and intro, Evison warns that if anyone joins to pimp their books he will, among other things, track them down, break into their house, and steal their scotch. Of course, some writers can't help themselves. And when they post a topic about "this great new book I've (sic) writen", rather than delete the post, we put it in a stockade in the digital village green and have some fun with it for a few days and sometimes for a few months. One title, A Prescription for Love, ranks among the most passionately discussed of all topics on Fiction Files Redux.

I joined Myspace three years ago because my high school-aged nieces (who have since moved on to Facebook and Twitter) said it would be a great way to build an audience for THE FUTURIST. If you're lead singer in a death metal band, maybe, but not for me. Yet, Myspace did lead me Fiction Files and a friendship with Jon Evison and more intelligent literary discourse than I've had in years. In exchange for their ideas and opinions I provided some of my own, which believe it or not, got me a handful of readers. I'm thinking about eleven.

Which brings me back to Twitter and books. In the past few weeks on Twitter I've learned more about the book and advertising world than I had in the past few years. I've swapped notes with other writers, booksellers, reviewers and ad people. And this week I watched two cool book-related things happen that should be noted when someone writes the 140 character history of Twitter. I followed fellow Doubleday author Colson Whitehead @Colsonwhitehead as he Tweeted during the start of the tour for his latest excellent novel, SAG HARBOR, and it was a thing to behold. No pimping or (note to self) awkward announcements. No navel gazing notes about the weather or quotidian "I'm going to bed now" updates. Instead, he posted and continues to post a series of glib, self-deprecating ("icy post-modernist book tour continues") dispatches from the literary front lines. My favorite was a note about forgetting that Leonard Lopate does his WNYC show in the nude, but most brilliant was the subtle Twitter appearance of Whitehead's beleaguered and resentful "assistant" @assistantJarvis, whose sniping and griping about her relationship with her boss became a piece of performance art unto itself.

I have to believe that Whitehead's intention was to have fun with a potentially uncomfortable platform that, if mishandled, could have turned book folks off. His presumably unexpected reward? Last night SAG HARBOR was the first ever Twitter Book Club #TBC selection.

Will Twitter push SAG HARBOR to best-sellerdom? I hope so. But I have a feeling the great reviews and buzz surrounding it will get the job done.

Can any kind of marketing "make" a book? Again, who knows. But,for intellectual, and shamefully self-serving reasons, I welcome your thoughts.

It's been my experience that rather than selling books, engaging in social networks keeps me from writing them.

But so does a lot of things I enjoy.

@jamespothmer

TECHEOLOGY: Dead gadgets unearthed in my home (and what we were thinking when we got them)

2009-05-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

In No Particular Order
"Universal means universal. Uni=one. Versal=remote."
"Of course we need a microscanner that allows you to see your hair follicles on the wide screen."
"The fact that it only plays a select format with limited options should not be an issue."
"The little film cassettes will be the default format for decades."
"One stores data and the other stores...well, all the other important stuff."
"I swear Dad, this system cannot be improved upon."
"What's truly amazing, is it's a boom box, AND a CD player."
"Combine this sucker with a reel-to-reel and your house is party central."
"A real photographer shoots in 35mm. And you, JPO, are a real photographer."
"No worries. They'll carry this film for ever."
"Thank you for your gift of this fine thing that, um, counts my footsteps."
"The iBook is a durable machine. So I'll skip the AppleCare."
"i have seen the future of desktop computing and its name is iMac."
"I don't care if it's a gift, that little robot gives me the creeps."
"All you do is remember to put your iPod into the clock radio-pod every night? Cooool."
"PCs are every bit as valuable to someone in the arts as the Mac."

Amazonian Adventure

2009-05-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

Hello, James!

Hello, James P. Othmer. We have some great personalized recommendations for you in our bookstore. For instance, we noticed that customers who bought Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer also bought trendy, must-read fiction by people much younger, hipper and more gifted than you, like ZZ Packer, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Jhumpa Lahiri or Zadie Smith. Perhaps you’d like to consider some more realistic, age-appropriate recommendations by authors with whom you might actually identify, like Nick Hornby, Richard Ford, John Irving, or the late Saul Bellow.

By the way, we’ve also noticed that your wife has recently purchased Women Power by Dr. Laura, All Men Are Jerks Until Proven Otherwise by Daylle Deanna Schwartz and (her fourth copy in six years of) The Peter Pan Syndrome by Dan Kiley You might want to know that other husbands of wives who have recently purchased Women Power by Dr. Laura, All Men Are Jerks Until Proven Otherwise by Daylle Deanna Schwartz and (repeatedly) The Peter Pan Syndrome by Dan Kiley have taken it upon their adult selves to purchase Things A Man Should Know About Marriage, Fear and Intimacy and How to Romance the Woman You Love –the Way She Wants you to! and not, The Complete Frank Miller Batman or Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.

We’ve also noticed that you’ve recently ordered yet another copy (your third in six years) of On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner as well as The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates, which leads us to believe that you’re still trying to write or one day hope to write the great American novel. May we suggest instead Moving On by Larry McMurtry, Snap Out of It by Ilene Segalove or The Delusional Person by R. Horacio Etchegoyan? Or perhaps you should simply stick to your career in advertising.

Also, based on your recent history, (notably the camo cargo pants and sleeveless mesh t-shirt purchases from our sporting goods shop), we have some more sartorial recommendations for you in our designer menswear boutique, including a stunning new Armani suit that has been recommended for you by a friend. We can’t tell you this friend’s name, but we can tell you that she used to sleep in the same room as you.

What else? We’ve also noticed from your customer profile that yesterday was your birthday and that you spent most of it lurking on hotsororitywebcam.com and Metstraderumors.com. All of the above, combined with your recent purchases from our music store of less than uplifting CDs by the likes of Tom Waits, Trent Reznor, Nick Cave and Morrissey suggest that you might be clinically depressed. And you might be interested to know that previous customers whom we thought were clinically depressed and whom also purchased CDs by the likes of Tom Waits, Trent Reznor, Nick Cave and Morrissey also purchased discounted psychotropic meds like Lithium, Prozac and Zoloft direct from our on-line pharmacy. You also might want to know that many of the same clinically depressed people who also purchased CDs by the likes of Tom Waits, Trent Reznor, Nick Cave and Morrissey and had also purchased discounted psychotropic meds like Lithium, Prozac and Zoloft from our on-line pharmacy had previously tried, without success, self medicating with Jack Daniels Bourbon, Patron Reposado Tequila and Monkey Business by The Black-Eyed Peas (all of which, incidentally, even though they won’t help one little bit, can be purchased at our on-line liquor and music stores).

If you’d like additional, more brutally frank recommendations for every aspect of your life, please click here.

If you’re not James P. Othmer, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, please click here.

(from ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, Doubleday, 9/09)

Kentucky Fried Fiasco

2009-05-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

http://adage.com/article?article_id=136551
So, as per the link from AdAge, KFC continues to make a mess of what's left of it's brand equity. Grilled chicken is not a way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Every fast food joint and salad bar in America has a grilled chicken offering. Grilled chicken doesn't need a secret recipe. Even I can grill a chicken breast. What this really says is they're afraid and ashamed of the F in KFC. They don't want to be known for the one thing they're known for. Fried chicken.

What next, strip the Colonel (who actually never rose higher than the rank of Private in WWI) of his white suit and put his animated image in an Adidas sweat suit?

Please.

Who am I who knows so much about the peddling of sodium-saturated chicken? I was creative director on KFC long enough to see a lot of good work torn to shreds by paranoid marketing folks and impatient franchisees. I discuss those extra-special, extra-crispy days, at length, in ADLAND.

Credits: Don Draper, copy; Hannah Barbara, art.

2009-05-11T10:16:00.000-07:00

Literary Landmarks

2009-05-06T06:16:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in writer's houses, writer's bars and the places that may have influenced or informed a great piece of literature. Sloppy Joe's in Key West never did much for me but most other writerly places, especially those without the commemorative tee-shirts and mugs, have. Often it's enough to simply have a beer in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village and think about Dylan Thomas raging there during his final days. Or to walk in Poe's brilliant and delirious footsteps along Shockoe in Richmond. Joyce's Dublin/Paris. Faulkner's Mississippi. Fante's fleabag hotel room in LA. Dante's tomb in Florence. I've mentioned here before that Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road in a small well house less than a mile down the road from where I now. I recently raised a glass to Yates and the star-crossed Wheelers in that very well house and and enjoyed it immensely.

I'm posting about this now because a couple of days ago up in Western Mass I had an interesting literary landmark double header. One planned, the other serendipitous.

At dawn outside of Stockbridge, my brother-in-law and I climbed Monument Mountain, a modest 1600 foot rise, the granite and quartz top of which, Squaw Peak, provided a stunning view of the green-blooming Housatonic Valley. At the Peak I pulled out the trail map that I'd grabbed at the base of the park and happened to read about two esteemed writers from eastern Mass who were finally introduced on a hike on Monument Mountain in 1850. One named Herman and the other Nathaniel. According to the map: "Hawthorne, who had just finished the Scarlett Letter, provided ideas and encouragement that inspired Melville to complete a novel he was struggling with; Melville would dedicate Moby Dick to Hawthorne in 1851."

Since my brother-in-law isn't much of a fiction reader -- engineering is his thing -- our ideas and encouragement mostly had to do with craft beer and our diminished climbing skills.

Part II was planned. We had driven to Stockbridge to take our kids (most specifically my eight year-old nephew who is an old house buff, if one can be a buff at anything when you're barely one in dog years) to see some estates, specifically Edith Wharton's "The Mount". It's a terrific piece of architecture, mostly designed by EW, and heavily influenced by Italian and (especially the gardens) English estates. This is where she lived for ten years during what the guides called a "mismatched marriage". I love when the guides are forbidden to tell the truth. Was she gay? Was he cheating on her? Or was she cheating on him with her pal Henry James. Unless he was gay...I forget.

Anyway, this is where Wharton wrote House of Mirth, the book that put her, and in many ways, female American novelists, on the map. The desk and her impressive book collection and garden view is still there. Henry James had his own room upstairs and often wrote fondly of the place.

I wonder what Edith and Henry would have thought about seeing four kids under the age of 11 howling through the halls, pressing the docent for details regarding ghost sightings.

Much of The Mount has been lovingly restored but much is in disrepair. As can be expected in this economy, funds are scarce. A similar situation exists at Mark Twain's gorgeous Victorian down the road in West Hartford. If you're in the area, visit them. It's worth it, and your ticket helps keep them on life support.

Of Wharton's 40 published books, I think I've only read The Age of Innocence and the suicidal sledding love story Ethan Frome. I plan on giving House of Mirth a shot this summer.

More changes from Specter Camp

2009-04-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

In related news, Senator Specter announces that he has changed allegiances from the Philadelphia Phillies to the New York Mets, and his favorite cereal is now Quisp. Rumors of a gender/name change to Arleen remain unconfirmed.

http://www.retroist.com/2009/01/20/quake-cereal-commercial/

The Brand Bubble author on ADLAND

2009-04-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

"From pitches in corporate boardrooms to beers at the Gutter bar, ADLAND is a highly enjoyable romp through the world of advertising. Othmer's writing on the industry is both vivid and poignant, with a lot a humor sprinkled in for good measure. After all, it’s not brain surgery. " --John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer, Y&R, author of The Brand Bubble

Branded Planet: Moanalua Gardens, Oahu, Hawaii

2009-04-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my friend took us to Moanalua Gardens in Honolulu. The tree above is called the Hitachi Tree because, well, Hitachi pays a small fortune for the "image rights" to it. Apparently it's a big deal back in Japan, because dozens of Japanese tourists rushed to it immediately after getting out of their vehicles. Millions visit it every year, and ignore the similar trees nearby. My pal says Hitachi pays about $400k US annually for the rights. Sounds preposterous, but Hitachi also helps preserve the rest of the park and gardens.

The reason we visited is because our friend, James T. Ferla, a master woodworker who also knows everything about every plant, tree, legend, building and sake bar on Oahu, is restoring the tea house and the island's first western-style building, built for the king, on the property.

Though he doesn't specialize in rustic work, he also made about a half dozen of the above benches out of natural, felled wood. His work is all over the island, galleries, hotels and was even part of "This Old House" Hawaiin edition. Some of it's at Jamestferla.com Pretty cool.

A City Stripped Clean of Advertising

2009-04-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Cool project by Coley Porter Bell, Sao Paulo.

www.cpb.co.uk/blog/2009/03/sao-paulo-the-end-of-advertising/

Via Christian Barnett

The Nicest Thing a Professor Has Ever Said About Me:

2009-04-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

"For nearly half a century, David Ogilvy’s CONFESSIONS OF AN ADVERTISING MAN has served as the Old Testament for an industry. Now there’s a new one: James Othmer’s ADLAND. Fully aware of (but not made giddy by) the many changes that have brought advertising from the classical Age of Ogilvy to our current era of the digital baroque, Othmer describes the art of commerce with the insight of an insider and the bemusement of a novelist."

Robert Thompson
Professor of Popular Culture, Syracuse University

Ad News from The Onion:

2009-04-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Director For ASPCA Commercial Demands Sadder Looking Dogs

LOS ANGELES—According to witnesses, commercial director Nathan Foster, 40, is irate over the insufficiently pathetic condition of the dogs being used in the 30-second television spot he is directing for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "These dogs are barely morose, and they need to be fucking pitiful!" Foster was overheard yelling at his casting coordinator during the shoot. "They look like they could start frolicking all over the place any minute! You couldn't get me even one mutt with a missing eye or three legs or something?" At press time, sources said that Foster has ordered production assistants to viciously beat the dogs for several hours so the animals can at least cower convincingly.

Bestselling author Daniel H. Pink compares ADLAND to Sinclair's The Jungle, only without the annoying ground animal parts aftertaste.

2009-04-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

"What Upton Sinclair did for meatpacking, Jim Othmer has done for advertising -- only with far more humor and far less (physical) horror. ADLAND is destined to become a classic of its kind -- a must read for anyone brave (or insane or aimless) enough to toil in the fields of modern advertising." -- Daniel H. Pink, author of A WHOLE NEW MIND

Harris Survey: Ad Agencies Ruined the economy

2009-04-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

Reported in Agencyspy.com.

My bad. I vaguely remember planting a personal subliminal message to Bernie Madoff in a 1998 AT&T. In the ice cubes it said, "Ponzi will set you free, Bernie."

Somehow I missed the champagne phase

2009-04-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Makes me want to play.

2009-04-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

I like these.

Advertising Agency: JWT Frankfurt, Germany
Art Director: Petra Sievers
Copywriter: Michael Muck

Postcards from Adland

2009-03-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Artifacts from a few of the places I visited while writing ADLAND.

Time-Released Bliss, or, This blog will be infinitely better in 2010

2009-03-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

TIME-RELEASED BLISS is when a company, government or individual tells you that great things are coming in the future in order to distract you from the mess they've created today.

Take the much maligned 2008-9 NY Knicks. No one talks about the earnest yet hapless team presently on the court at MSG. Instead, it’s all about the year 2010, when they will finally have some salary cap room and which is also the year that LeBron James and Dewayne Wade will be free agents and might possibly accept their gazillions.

Why dwell on present tense mediocrity when we can envision a dream hypothetical two years out?

That's TIME-RELEASED BLISS.

Exhibit B: Chevy. What's the best way to diffuse talk of bankruptcy and bailouts and gas-guzzlers? Spend tens of millions running Super Bowl and other ads for the Volt, an electric car that may or may not be available in limited numbers until late 2010.

TIME-RELEASED BLISS.

By the way, maybe the Volt should be the Official Car of the Knicks in 2010.

When will combat troops be out of Iraq? Mid to late 2010.

TIME-RELEASED BLISS.

Have you noticed the promos NBC has been running during its increasingly weak prime time broadcasts telling us to get ready for the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010?

It’s not about 2010. It’s about distracting us from the mess they’re in, and the mediocrity they’re selling us today.

What happens to a nation being encouraged to live in the future because living in the moment is apparently such a bummer?

Beats me. But my second novel is coming out in late 2010 and I expect nothing less that a Nobel.

Jugular's Jeff Griffith calls ADLAND "The best overview of advertising I've ever read."

2009-03-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

“We spend our Advertising careers inventing, reinventing, deconstructing, disassembling, creating and recreating ourselves (and our work) in the name of being “fresh.” Othmer’s observation of this non-stop process is hysterically entertaining and yet painfully close to home. It’s the best overview of advertising I’ve ever read.

“My friends and family have no idea what I do on a day-to-day basis but this book comes eerily close to describing it. Othmer self-deprecatingly and hysterically captures the lunacy, community and frequently ridiculous state of affairs in the Advertising world. A must-read for all clients, students and anyone who’s ever been in the trenches.

“What a great book about where the ad biz has been and where we’re going. Those that don’t read this are naively stuck in the dark ages and won’t survive.

“If you like Mad Men or Bewitched reruns, you’ll love this REAL observation of the advertising world from the trenches. Othmer describes his firsthand drama and elation with the old guard of advertising then pulls back the curtain on the future of the “non-advertising” agencies that are taking the industry to the next level. You’re gonna LOVE this book.”

--Jeff Griffith, Co-founder, Creative Director, Jugular Advertising

Endeavor's Mark Dowley on ADLAND

2009-03-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

"Othmer captures the authentic, raw and visceral feel of the advertising world, and actually makes it wildly entertaining. He never forgets it's not science, it's all about the people. Bravo." --Mark Dowley, Partner, Endeavor

Two Things I Learned About the Economy Last Week

2009-02-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

1. People are really pissed. Angry in a public stoning kind of way. Of course I sensed it but it really hit home for me when I did this Room for Debate piece about executive bonuses for the Times:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/bonuses-for-bad-performance/#othmer

The so-called expert debate was interesting, but it's the comments section that really blew me away. So far, 806 angry people have weighed in, most posting responses significantly longer than the 300 word limit my editor imposed upon us. For context, 806 is about four times the response they got for previous topics, including the stimulus package, Iraq, etc. Most of the responders wanted blood, and quite a few wondered what the Times was doing asking a novelist, talking about semantics of all things (note to self: don't use irony when writing about the financial sector), what he thought. I did, too.

2. People are dying for some good news. The most recent evidence of this is Media is Thriving, the blog-like thing Rick Webb at The Barbarian Group has been posting on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/mediaisthriving

The premise: only positive news about the media. The result: only positive, if not world-changing news about the media, with more than 2500 Twitterers already following.

Super Bowl Advertising Don'ts During a Recession

2009-01-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

Timothy Geithner for H&R Block.

The revelation, “That’s because, this year we could only afford to feed five Clydesdales.”

Suze Orman singing, dancing and calculating adjustable rate mortages for Pepsi.

The tagline, “The perfect beer for these devastatingly crushing times.”

Any scenario set on a bread line, soup kitchen or the ledge of an office building.

The “Go Daddy” girl petitioning Congress for a bailout or, doing anything.

“Doritos: not just a tasty snack… a reasonably inexpensive dinner.”

For Career Builder.com, a black screen backed by a derisive laugh track for 24 seconds, followed by a title card that reads: “That’s what you get for not responding to our spot last year.”

Bernie Madoff for Debeers. Or eTrade.

A Coke spot set at a bottle redemption center.

Any word that even remotely rhymes with Ponzi.

The Thing About Corporate Bonuses is They're Not

2009-01-29T15:04:00.000-08:00

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/bonuses-for-bad-performance/#othmer

I wrote this today as part of an online debate about corporate bonuses for the New York Times.

By James P. Othmer

The problem isn’t with corporate bonuses; it’s with corporate semantics.

By definition, a bonus is “something in addition to what is expected or strictly due.” Perhaps, pre-Enron, pre-Madoff, pre-collapse of the financial, real estate and automotive industries, executives got away with receiving their annual seven figure bonuses because we were willing to believe that they truly were surprised by them. Or we were so comfortable with our own financial situation that we didn’t care.

After all, it was a bonus! Super-sized versions of the token gestures we were occasionally given even in our own jobs. The holiday turkey. The extra week’s paycheck. Or, if you happened to work in my field of advertising during the 1990s, the window pane envelope filled with soon to be worthless stock options.

The primary reason we could call them bonuses is because some years we got one, but for so many others we got an explanation. A key account was lost. The global network had an off year. Something to do with the price of something.

Any true bonus has the thrill of uncertainty about it. And the knowledge that when you finally get a good one all of your vocational stars are in alignment.

However, when a bonus is not only expected but mandated under any circumstance, it ceases to be a bonus. It becomes an outrage. Same goes for perks.

All of which is why I’m convinced if the Wall Street executives who this year raked in the sixth-highest haul in the history of bonuses, despite being responsible for the worst performing market of our lifetime, simply had the foresight to call their windfall anything but a bonus, we’d be cool with them.

We don’t need to reform corporate bonuses. We just need to rephrase them. Too bad bailout is taken.

Praise from Team Digital 's David Griffith

2009-01-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

"ADLAND is a wry and insightful look at the insanity that is the world of advertising...Gone are the days of David Ogilvy & Don Draper. ADLAND provides a peek 'behind the curtain' of the new world of advertising as seen through the eyes of an advertising veteran who has seen it all and lived to tell about it. A must read for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes into creating an ad."
--David Griffith, Creative Director,Team Digital

Desmond Hall of Global Hue on ADLAND

2009-01-22T07:25:00.001-08:00

"Othmer tells it like it plays out every day and how it's probably going to play out tomorrow. And he does it with a sweet blend of sarcasm, sincerity and biting humor that makes you think "Is advertising really that bad? And if it is, how can I get in?"
--Desmond Hall, SVP, Executive Creative Director, Global Hue

Full disclosure: Desmond and I shared an office and many pints in the late 1980s; that said, he's never been averse to telling me when something I've written sucks. And I'm fairly sure that he did read the book.

Can one line in a trailer make or break a movie?

2009-01-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

Interesting article about movie marketing in this week's The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_friend. It makes a pretty good, and fairly depressing case for the fact the 90 second trailer is almost as important as the film itself.

It focuses on the heavily focus-grouped buildup to two movies, the months-old Oliver Stone biopic "W" and a forthcoming Renee Zellweger flick, and describes a world where test audiences rule, movies die without one killer trailer moment, and how execs can tell whether a film, after years of planning, will die by dinner time opening Friday.

It made me think of the trailer I'd seen for "Revolutionary Road", in particular the line where Leo as Frank Wheeler whispers "Everything's gonna be all right," into Kate's ear. Now I haven't yet seen the movie, but I've read Richard Yates's classic book several times, knew the author and -- SPOILER ALERT -- bloody well know that everything will absolutely not be all right in their world!

The lesson: movie marketers are all about finding one ultra concentrated moment that will get people into the theaters, even if it means misleading people beforehand, and don't seem to care so much how you feel once you get there.

I wonder if this approach would hold true for publishing, and at what expense?

How Not to Talk to a Depressed Nation: volume 1.1

2009-01-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

The year is 1930.

Two insurance companies take two radically different approaches in ads targeted to people standing on bread lines, unemployment lines and, well, office building ledges.

One uses comfort as a selling point.

The other, biological terror.

I'd bet that even in a flush economy, using the word typhoid in your headline is a no-no.

Pip Coburn calls Adland "Required reading for my team."

2009-01-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

This just in from insights guru Pip Coburn, founder of Coburn Ventures and author of THE CHANGE FUNCTION: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn. Pip is also a former Managing Director and Global Technology Strategist at UBS.

"I loved it. Of the hundreds of great books I have been fortunate to have read over the years this qualifies among the very few as required reading for my team. Not only is James Othmer a truly fresh engaging writer, he is digging at the truth in his own career with crisp intensity and coming to insight after insight in a way that helps all of us as we go forward as well.

"Othmer is one of the most interesting authors I have come across in the past ten years. While everyone and their brother aspires to be a refreshing change, Othmer is one. More important than his world class skill as a writer is his intention. In ADLAND he is neither playing an angry "blame game" or seeking the attention of a tell-all "Jose Conseco knows steroids" melodrama. It is far more interesting, notable and worthwhile than that. He seeks the truth of his own twenty year life in advertising to find his next steps in life and hopes to share anything he might know so the reader might also find their own truth. James Othmer is just getting started. I am glad I am here at the beginning.

"I found this incredibly entertaining, 'lean-in' book a vehicle as well for my own personal growth as I wrestled with each abstract that Othmer unearthed. Though the content of my life and work are different, the lessons from his introspection assisted my own."

Advertising During the Great Depression

2009-01-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

For obvious reasons, I Googled the title of this post and came up with the following long yet interesting response, via Google Answers.

Not all was gloom and doom during the Great Depression. It
was a time when those who knew what they were doing made great
economic strides and the very nature of the depression itself was an
economic boon for them. It was a time when several companies
benefited from aggressive marketing while their rivals cut back. A
good example of that would be Kellogg besting C.W. Post during that
time. Consumers didn't totally stop spending during the depression,
most just looked for better deals and the companies providing those
better deals came out stronger after the depression ended. When
spending picked up, consumer loyalty to those companies remained.

To state a generality, those companies who not only survived but did
well and grew during the Great Depression are those who continued to
act as though there were nothing wrong and that the public had money
to spend. In other words, they advertised. These are industries who
didn't wait for public demand for their products to rise, they created
that demand even during the most difficult of times. Because so many
companies cut spending during that era, advertising budgets were
largely eliminated in many industries. Not only did spending decline,
these companies actually dropped out of public sight because of short
sighted decisions made about spending money to keep a high profile.
These advertising cutbacks caused many customers to feel abandoned and
associated the effected brands with a lack of staying power. This not
only drove customers to more aggressive competitors but caused a
certain amount of financial mistrust when it came to making additional
investments in the no longer visable companies.

Both anecdotal and emperical evidence support the case that
advertising was the main factor in the growth or downfall of companies
during those years. To put it bluntly, the companies which
demonstrated the most growth and which rang up the most sales were
those which advertised heavily. The Great Depression offers classic
examples of the power of brand advertising even during times of
economic crisis.

Proctor and Gamble - This is a company which has a philosophy of not
reducing advertising budgets during times of recession and they
certainly did not make any such reduction during the Depression. P&G
has made progress in every one of the major recessions and that is no
accident. When their competitors were swinging the budget axe, P&G
actually increased their spending. While the Depression caused
problems for many, P&G came out of it unscathed. Radio took P&G's
message into more homes than ever.

Chevrolet - During the 1920s, Fords were outselling Chevrolets by 10
to 1. In spite of the Depression, Chevrolet continued to expand its
advertising budget and by 1931, the "Chevy 6" took the lead in its
field and remained there for the next five years.

Camel Cigarettes - in 1920 Camel was the top selling tobacco product.
American Tobacco Company then struck back with the Lucky Strike brand
and by 1929 Lucky had overtaken Camel as the number one brand. Two
years later in the heart of the Depression, Chesterfield also overtook
Camel. Camel countered with a massive increase in advertising
spending and by doing so demonstrated the power of advertising during
depressed times. By 1935, it was back on top.

Now, these examples count as anecdotal. But in addition to these
examples, studies have demonstrated that during times of recession,
companies that maintain advertising during these periods experience
higher sales and profits during the downturns and afterward than
companies who cut their advertising budgets.

It was also the very nature of this advertising that spurred the
growth of two other industries during the Depression. The first of
which was radio broadcasting.

Let's return to Proctor and Gamble for a while. P&G first turned to
radio in 1923 advertising Crisco on a New York station. Other
products such as Ivory and Lava soap were advertised on 'product
oriented' shows which were similar to todays infomercials. But in the
heart of the depression P&G took a step which changed not only that
company but the broadcast medium forever while creating great demand
for its products. The president of P&G at the time was Richard
Deupree. In spite of the fact that shareholders were demanding that
he cut back on advertising, he knew that people were still buying
essential household products. So he created radio programming that
did not focus on a product. Because of that, we now have a cultural
attribute known as the "soap opera."

In 1933, P&G went on the air with its first "soap" - "Ma Perkins,"
sponsored by Oxydol. P&G was so satisfied with the increase of sales,
they went on to introduce "Vic and Sadie" for Crisco, "O,Niells" for
Ivory Soap and "Forever Young" for Camay. By the time 1939 rolled
around, P&G was sponsoring 21 radio programs and they doubled their
radio advertising budget every two years during the Depression.

Radio was one of the fastest growth industries of the depression. P&G
virtually built daytime radio with its advertising budgets and
programming. Two industries were thriving from the advertising budget
of one.

The print media was also a growth industry during the Depression. To
give some reason for this, we now return to Chevrolet. the first ads
for Chevrolet appeared in print in 1914. In 1927, they began to
increase their print advertising budget. As the country moved into
the Depression a couple of years later, Chevy did not let its
commitment to print advertising falter and its car ads not only kept
some publications afloat, it helped many to grow. In as much as the
term "print media" covers many outlets, they pioneered the outdoor
advertising medium, billboards. Chevrolet also went into radio and
sponsored such Depression Era classics as Fred Allen and Jack Benny.
Chevy's print ads appealed to the "emotional" side of a buying
decision which was a great move in light of the economic uncertainty
of the time.

So once again, those companies which took advantage of the Depression
and came through in good form were those who kept their name in front
of the public in spite of a lack of purchasing power.

What distinguished the companies that did well during the Depression? They were the
companies that kept their name in front of the public and created
brand name recognition even during the worst of times.

I don't need a chicken ad to tell me we're in a recession.

2008-12-30T09:56:00.000-08:00

Disturbing trend watch: ads that use phrases such as "for these troubled times" or "because now more than ever we need to count every penny" or...well, you get the idea.

You know we're in a recession. I know we're in a recession. Every media outlet in the country covers its downward spiral by the nanosecond.

Which is exactly why we don't need a car ad or a fast food commercial to constantly remind us of this fact. Obviously, advertisers are making the crude mistake of giving a literal interpretation to aspects of briefs (ie, "our target market has less and less disposable income") which are meant to inform the creative, not become it.

Telling us that you're reducing prices or offering a better value is all we really need to know. We can connect the dots and somehow retain a shred of dignity and peace of mind. But telling us that you're giving us a free coke and an extra side of cole slaw with our bucket of fowl because you feel our economic pain is not only unnecessary. It's inexcusable, offensive and a bailout-sized bummer.

Benjamin Button's Advertisng DNA

2008-12-29T10:04:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan of David Fincher since he did AT&T's "You Will" campaign for my old agency NW Ayer back in the early 1990's. Since then I've closely followed his films, including the recent Brad Pitt reverse biopic "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button".

I enjoyed the film. In fact, while I had my quibbles with aspects of Pitt's performance and the story (which is only remotely, conceptually related to F. Scott Fitzgerald's similarly titled and not exactly classic short story), I thought it was a visual tour de force.

It's fairly well known that big brand, :30 second TV spots, especially those done during the Internet boom of the 1990s, have about twenty times more money and attention per second lavished upon them than any feature film. But somehow Fincher has been able to compose, light and film his big screen productions ("Seven", "Fight Club") with a similar sensibility.

In fact, at least three times during the film -- most notably during the character summary at the end and the story of how Daisy hurt her leg -- I could have sworn that a 1990's multi-million dollar branding spot had broken out. In a good way. Really.

I'm rarely dazzled by the visuals in a feature that's not an epic CGI extravaganza and it was refreshing to see someone have some fun with the conventional approach.

Other than Fincher, the only directors I can think of who have managed to bring his or her impressive and daring visual commercial approach to (successful) features are, perhaps, Michel Gondry and Spike Jones.

I wonder if this is because of budgets, conservative studios, or fear of failure on the director's part.

Outcast Socials

2008-12-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

A fifth invitation in one week to join another exclusive group of like-minded people leads me to believe it's time for a thinning of the herd in the social networking world. A series of digital, winner take all cage matches is in order.

If that works, we move onto blogs.

Roy Blount: Support Your Local Independent Bookstore

2008-12-18T12:23:00.000-08:00

Got this message the other day from Roy Blount, president of the Author's Guild, and wanted to pass it along:

Dear Member:

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Miracles and an Unfortunate Tour of the Back Office on 34th Street

2008-12-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

Spent the weekend in Manhattan doing holiday things with the family. This included a first on Sunday morning: a visit with Santa at his legendary workshop at Macy’s on 34th Street. Since we'd almost been trampled to death at Rockefeller Center the night before, we arrived at Macy’s at 9am, where an 8th-floor elf informed us that it would be a minimum wait of 45 minutes to see the big guy. I usually don’t start getting really cranky until noon, and the kids were game, so why not? We inhaled deeply and took our place between the velvet ropes.

At first all was fine. The elves couldn’t have been more chipper, and the line wound around the exterior of Santa’s place, so entrance to the promised land at least seemed attainable.

But then it got progressively more depressing.

The line snaked into an old, long, red-walled corridor whose only decorations were faded photos of long ago Thanksgiving Day parades. This first corridor was maybe 50 yards long, but I wouldn’t argue if someone said it was a mile.

At the end of corridor one we made a left down another extremely long hallway decorated with more drab pics of ancient parades. The biggest holiday buzz-killing aspect of this journey wasn’t the shabby condition of the walls and ceilings, it was the drawn faces of others on the Santa pilgrimage who had made a u-turn up ahead, somewhere in Hoboken, and were re-trekking through the same grim, back office wasteland.

Next an elf led us past the Land of Empty Mid-level Executive Offices and then, I kid you not, the Human Resources Forest.

When we final doubled back and made it into the general vicinity of perhaps the most famous department store Santa of all, things got much better. Cheery music. Clever and engaged role players. A gorgeous wintry train set from Lionel and an assortment of quaint Christmas setups guided us to Kringle’s feet. After nice private talk and photo op with Santa the 45-minute death march was all but forgotten.

But not really. I mean, I realize that this is a five or six week deal at best for Macy’s. Also, it's an enormous crowd control challenge and it wouldn’t make sense for them to go all Epcot with its staging area.

But still. Here they have a chance to enchant, surprise and inform tens of thousands of motivated holiday shoppers (per day, is my guess), a huge, willing, captivated audience, for more than 45 minutes, and they walk us through HR?

The only thing worse would have been having the kids pass through the smoking lounge or mingle with irate customers in the Returns section.

I expected more from the people behind the Thanksgiving Day parade, the brand that decades ago was smart enough to put a North Pole mail box smack in the middle of the first floor.

I’m not suggesting that they sell to us in that space. Because even though we are in a department store, commercializing the Santa ritual would be an equally bad mistake. I just think that a smart company with some imaginative partners that understands branded entertainment could make the whole experience – and the Macy’s brand -- exponentially more memorable.

JAMIE BARRETT PRAISES ADLAND

2008-12-09T12:35:00.000-08:00

The first advance quote for this many-titled book just came in.

"I've been in advertising more than twenty years and spent countless hours trying to tell people how insane and hilarious and exciting and pointless and fascinating it all is. Now all I have to do is hand them this book."

-Jamie Barrett, Creative Director/Partner Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco

Yet another title

2008-12-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

In the beginning there was a book called THE DEATH OF DARRIN STEPHENS. Then, because it was believed that this was too obscure and dated for a mass market book title, there was BRANDED: SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE IN ADLAND. Now there is ADLAND: SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE ON A BRANDED PLANET, because people (not, I imagine the readers of the popular similarly titled ad blog) seemed to like the word ADLAND. Other than the fact that I may have to change this blog all over again, I'm fine with it.