Considering this video went viral you've likely already seen it, but hey, why not see it again?
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Ogilvy on Copywriting
It's easy to make fun of advertising folks because, well, far too many of them produce some truly crappy work. On the other hand there are some tremendously talented ad professionals who produce truly inspiring work. In other words advertising is like every other industry out there, populated by the good, the bad and the ugly.
One of the paragons of advertising was David Ogily and this letter he wrote about his process for copywriting shows that his process was anything but painless:
1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.
3. I am helpless without research material—and the more "motivational" the better.
4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.
5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.
6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.
7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.
9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.
11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)
12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
Creative Legislating
Who needs reality shows when you have politics? Virginia might have the best show going right now:
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
"We need some gender equity here," she told HuffPost. "The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we're going to do that to women, why not do that to men?"
The Republican-controlled senate narrowly rejected the amendment Monday by a vote of 21 to 19, but passed the mandatory ultrasound bill in a voice vote. A similar bill in Texas, which physicians say has caused a "bureaucratic nightmare," is currently being challenged in court.
Cool Dad Covers Depeche Mode with a Kazoo and Two Kids
I watched this and wondered, "Did I ever do anything with my kids that was even 1/10th as cool as this?"
Why Innovation in the Textbook Market is Hard
On his AVC blog Fred Wilson shares an interesting piece from the American Conservative about why innovation in the textbook market is so difficult:
Within the world of regular public school education, educational professionals have distinctly limited ability to express any kind of preferences – and the Bush-era education reforms have reduced this scope even further. The target market for textbook publishers is the politicians who set the curriculum for the nation’s largest school systems where that curriculum is set statewide: California and Texas. It matters very little what an individual teacher in Houston or Oakland wants or needs – or thinks their students need.
If you want to see disruptive change in the textbook market, then, you’d need to identify both a potential supplier of the product with no stake in propitiating the incumbents, and a buyer of the product for whom the product solves a problem.
My suspicion is that your best bet would be to have the supplier and the purchaser be, in some sense, the same entity. And I can think of two parts of the educational landscape where that situation might obtain: the KIPP network of high-performing charter schools and the home-schooling movement.
In the past I've shared my frustration with the whole textbook cartel. I'd love nothing better than for someone to blow that industry up and figure out a better way to get teachers and students the tools they need.
Does “Forsaking All Others” Still Cut It?
Newt Gingrich's purported request to his second wife for an "open marriage" prompted a couple of economists to look at the marriage contract:
Marriage can be strengthened by shifting to individualized marital contracts that emphasize those things essential to making each relationship work. Is “forsaking all others” essential? What about splitting the housework? Should we live near my parents, yours, or neither? Who stays home from work when the kids are sick? Should we be spenders or savers? Will we retire at 55 or 75? How many kids? How will we allocate time between work, family, friends and each other?
These questions are at the heart of married life, but only one of them — sexual fidelity — is in the standard marriage contract…
The great Nobel laureate Gary Becker has suggested a way out of this bad equilibrium. What if it were compulsory to write a personalized marriage contract with your spouse, tailored to your own circumstances? Replacing today’s default marriage vows with compulsory personal contracts would create the space for two adults to seriously and soberly sit down and decide what it is that they want from married life.
Balancing Public Safety and Liberty
In preparation for the Democrats' convention the city council in Charlotte has passed a few ordinances that have some questioning if, in an effort to promote public safety, they've trampled on peoples' liberties:
People won't be allowed to carry items such as helmets and body armor; noxious substances; barricades, locks; pipes; mace or pepper spray; or other weapons.
In addition, the new ordinance prohibits people from carrying backpacks, satchels or coolers if police believe they are being used to carry weapons.
"They are frequently used to carry rocks and weapons," said CMPD Deputy Chief Harold Medlock, who is coordinating the police department's DNC response.
Medlock said during the 2008 DNC in Denver, some protesters would enter portable toilets and fill backpacks with feces, which were thrown at police.
The ACLU and others have been concerned that innocent people could be swept up in a police dragnet, such as people with bike helmets or people walking to work on Tryon Street with a briefcase. The ACLU has said the police can already stop someone if they have probable cause that a crime is taking place, and the group said it believes the ordinances are unnecessary…
Rolling With It
Have you read the story about the conductor who called out a concert attendee whose cell phone kept going off? That's one approach to dealing with a performance interruption, but this violist has another that I quite like. According to an article in the Huffington Post this is legit and not some kind of PR stunt.
Your Friendly Neighborhood White Nationalists
You ever wish you hadn't learned something because you were way more comfortable with your ignorance? That happened to me this week when I learned that Clemmons is the HQ for the North Carolina chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens which is considered a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Thanks Fec). With one quick Google search I learned that Clemmons had hosted the Council of Conservative Citizens' national conference last June.
I couldn't believe that I'd missed media coverage of the event – after all the media would love nothing more than a story about a controversial organization hosting its national conference in the area – so I went to the Winston-Salem Journal website to search for a story about it. I came up empty but did find an article from February, 2011 about the slight decline in North Carolina hate groups, and that article featured an interview with the CCC's North Carolina executive director, a Mr. A.J. Barker of Clemmons. Here's what Mr. Barker had to say:
A.J. Barker of Clemmons, the organization's executive director in North Carolina, said calling the council a hate group is unfair.
"That's totally ridiculous," Barker said.
He said there are good and bad people among both races, and he doesn't consider blacks worse than whites.
Barker said the council has been criticized by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center because of the council's stand on such issues as affirmative action and illegal immigration.
"When you take a stand like that, you're automatically stigmatized by groups like that," he said.
Okay, let's see what representatives from the Eastern Pennsylvania/New Jersey chapter of CCC had to say about the conference held in Clemmons in June, 2011:
Following up Mr. Taylor on the topic of being ‘victims of our virtues’ Louis March, a former aide to Senator Jesse Helms, gave a passionate speech and echoed the call for all White men and women to do whatever they can to save Western Civilization from impending destruction. He emphasized that we need work together for our group interests and not fall victim to what he referred to as “suicidal altruism”, which is essentially a term for how we as a race do every imaginable to lend aid and assistance to every other race at our own expense, even if it means heading down the path of our own extinction.
Mr. March went on to say that even though we must always seek to educate our people with regards to our histories and cultures, it is not enough. He stated that we need to do more than offer up intellectual arguments for people to ponder. We must inspire our people to be noble and charitable with regards to our own. We must inspire people to be heroes and take a stand as our ancestors in Europe did in repelling the invading colored hordes from Africa and Asia…
Sam Dickson, also a CofCC Director, began his presentation with the statement that he quite pessimistic and no linger hopefully in a political or “democratic” solution to our dilemma since we are no longer in control of our society in any area whether it be the government, educational institutions, or the media. He quoted George Orwell, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past”…
Mr. Dickson then went on to say that our only viable option, due to our socio-political dilemma and the demographic disaster we face due the sheer volume of nonwhite immigrants in the country, is to separate from this society and form a White entho-state where we can look out for our own self-interests without interference from others. He pointed that the success of such a drastic move is achievable by putting forth Israel as an example.
Yeah, I really don't know how someone could mistake them for a hate group. I mean their roots certainly wouldn't lead you to that conclusion would they?
Founded in 1985 by Gordon Baum, a worker's compensation attorney and longtime racist activist, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) rose from the ashes of the Citizens Councils of America (CCA), commonly called "White Citizens Councils," a coalition of white-supremacist groups and individuals formed throughout the South to defend school segregation after the Supreme Court outlawed the policy in 1954 in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Unlike the KKK, the CCA groups had a veneer of civic respectability, inspiring future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to refer to it as the "uptown Klan." While there were plenty of bare-knuckle racists attracted to the councils' anti-integration slogan, "Never!," the members also included bankers, merchants, judges, newspaper editors and politicians — folks given more to wearing suits and ties than hoods and robes. During the White Citizens Councils' heyday, the groups claimed more than 1 million members. Although they weren't immune to violence — Byron De La Beckwith, who murdered civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, was a member — the councils generally used their political and financial pull to offset the effects of "forced integration."
Once the segregation battle was lost, the air went out of the White Citizens Councils. The councils steadily lost members throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Sensing the need for a new direction, Baum, formerly the CCA's Midwest field director, called together a group of 30 white men, including former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox and future Louisiana Congressman John Rarick, for a meeting in Atlanta in 1985. Together, they cooked up a successor organization: the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Oy. Like I said, my ignorance of this was certainly bliss. I truly am astonished that this event was staged within a 45 minute drive of the Civil Rights Museum and no one seemed to have picked it up. In this day and age if four guys in hoods and sheets decide to have a "protest" at least 20 cameras will be there to cover it, yet a known white nationalist group holds its national conference here and no one even blinks? That's just amazing to me. (BTW, if it was covered and I just can't find it please feel free to let me know.) I don't know what's more sad – that the media are stretched thin enough that they didn't pick up on this, or that we've become so inured to this kind of bile that we just don't pay attention any more.
I guess the one bright spot is they didn't get any attention outside of their own small circle of twisted minds.
In Which I Make Fun of Myself
SNL hasn't been consistently funny for a while so I stopped watching, but I'll tip my hat to this skit. It's funny and spot on even if they do make fun of people who have eponymous websites. For the record I didn't double major in poetry and clowning, I never got a participation badge/trophy, I have been punched and I truly do realize I suck at most things I try to do:
Befuddled 