Do you work for free?

Agencies often do. Creatives frequently do. It's become nearly standard practice for companies to request free creative work. Ode to the dreaded RFP.

In the advertising/marketing world, free work is called "spec," possibly because it sounds more legit than "free." How did this start? I have no clue. But here's one agency's take on what working on "spec" would look like for the rest of the world.

PS: This agency no longer does spec work.



Tell me again how spec is legit?

Why shutting up may save the world

The world is plagued with problems. Talking may be the worst.

I've been reminded of this lately, like when my renters promised to pay for the carpet they damaged and then boot scootin boogied out without a dime. Or when a certain President in a certain country delivered a State of the Union speech with promises everyone has certainly heard before.

Yes we have. 

Talk is cheap, they say. And they say it a lot. We seem to think talk is the answer to all that ails us. Take kidnapped girls in Nigeria, for example. Last year a hashtage was the only way to save them. Celebrities, politicians, everyone galloped into Twitter to save the day. This year, we don't talk about them much. It might be because, last we heard, they were sold into sex slavery to Islamic terrorists. 

Maybe talk isn't cheap at all. In many cases, it's unimaginably costly.

In business, especially advertising, talk is constant. And repetitive. There's often greater commitment to the number of times a thing is said more than the relevance of the thing said. I see this often. Whenever a client or individual approaches me for content marketing advice, the first two questions I can count on hearing is:

- What sites should I be on?
- How often should I be posting?

The "what" of that post comes later, if at all. And, to me, that's the only question that really matters. But, heck. What do I know? Analytic charts just don't excite me as, apparently, they should. I don't care if 10,000 people heard nothing. I care that one heard something.

In all this talk, the poetry of action is getting lost. It's hard to accept how far we've committed to "meetings" and "committees" and "discussion" and "brainstorming" as our value base until our toilet gets clogged. When plumbers start talking at our pipes instead of clearing them, I'll be going up to the spirit in the sky.

We need less talk. More doing. Less blabber. More brawn. Less discussion. More motion. And on that note, I'll shut up.

The Super Bowl Commercial zone

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of commercial imagination. You are about to enter...the Super Bowl Commercial zone.

It's a world where creativity is currency, imagination is the obnoxious federal government, brands are celebrities, and commercials entertain more than the fourth-quarter of the actual game. Or, they completely bomb. The description of this commercial (which will not be revealed until game day, of course) struck me as particularly entertaining.

It's Wheat Thins. And you'll fight off Himalayan Yeti's to protect them.

It is nighttime, and as (a man) puts a contraption on his head, his wife, also in pajamas, enters the kitchen and asks what he is doing.

“Using night-vision goggles to keep an eye on my Spicy Buffalo Wheat Thins and make sure nobody touches them,” he says.

“Who’s going to take your Wheat Thins?” she says.

“Um, I don’t know,” he says, “an intruder, the dog, Bigfoot, Ted from next door.”

She turns off the light and the screen goes dark. There is the sound of a struggle in the kitchen and she turns on the light to reveal her husband clinging to the shoulders of an abominable snowman.

“Honey, I was close, it’s a yeti!” he shouts, as their neighbor runs into the kitchen and steals the Wheat Thins.

Monkey Who

The green ones aren't ripe. The yellow ones are.

Is this helpful or insulting? You tell me.



There's helping customers understand your product. And then there's treating your customers like four-year-olds, no offense to four-year-olds. I think they even know a green banana is yucky.

Punch Drunk Creative Love

Illustrations by

Brendon C. Thompson

The a/eye - for no explainable reason - reminds me of the Mel Brook's Get Smart, starring Don Adams. It was the 60s. Everyone had bigger eyebrows then.

And the Monkey, that just seems fitting since I saw it this morning while eating a banana for breakfast and thinking about the opening to Buck Rogers.




At age three, Brendon could draw anything. Not that I was there to notice. When I arrived on scene a year later, he had already wowed our parents with his artistic talent and all I could do was gurgle saliva bubbles.
But that's what older siblings do. They steal your thunder so you spend a lifetime trying to catch up.
Thankfully, I've always loved a good chase. And, besides, his artistic talent was just as much fun for me. Ask me one day to tell you about the backyard maze he created with the lawnmower in the field behind our house.

This is a shameless and brazen plug for his illustration work. If you need a logo designer, illustrator, or all around creative genius, he's a one-stop-shop of madcap brilliance.

He can also mow you a labyrinth in your overgrown yard.

(Post a message if you want his contact info and I'll send it on.)