I blame Bewitched.

If — as clients — everything we think we know about advertising we’ve learned from episodic tv at 11 years of age, then we’ve come to expect that the sales rep at the ad agency is also the guy or gal who comes up with the whole creative campaign.  Usually, in an eleventh-hour panic.  The only other ad creatives who lived in pre-digital tv land, Thirtysomething‘s Michael Steadman and Elliot Weston, were cut from a similar cloth.

 

As clients of digital marketing companies, local marketing agreement agencies, search engine marketers, social marketing experts, broadcast sales reps and newspaper sales reps, don’t we deserve the real thing?

There’s a lot of retail advertising made on the cheap by the media sales departments. And marketing gurus who know better.

A 1981 release, Neighbors, starred John Belushi and Dan Akroyd.  While Roger Ebert dug it, it was more flop than hit in its first run, but what’s not to like?  One particularly memorable image still hits home as an apt metaphor for lazy marketing today.  The bit of funny business when the Akroyd shady-new-neighbor character cons the Belushi neighbor character out of his cash and into a so-called fancy Italian restaurant take-out that’s really Ragu and store-bought spaghetti boiled at home.  Do you ever think your ad agency is like that, steaming off the Chef Boyardee labels and serving it up like it was made artisanal, and all that?

Oh sure, there’s a revolution out there somewhere, a battle between the old world of work and the new ways — authenticity, transparency  — helpful information and useful content triumphing over empty promises and unbelievable exaggerations that are easily recognized as “advertising” and tuned out.

Only, I don’t think it can be easily packaged or delivered by push-button.  The revolution will not be merchandised.

Hey, wait a minute.  Don’t we know advertising is a falsehood and a complicated dialog between our need for truth and our need to present a fictionalized persona of ourselves to the outside world?  Didn’t we all watch the final episode of Mad Men?

We won’t be right back, after these messages.

 

 

“We live in a world of radical transparency. There is 
nothing that’s really truly private long-term in the world we 
live in today. And while there’s something lost from that, 
there’s something gained. And the gain is an incredible 
priority on the truth. And in business, I believe truth is the 
ultimate advantage. I mean, it’s truth, and it’s trust. You 
can’t separate those two. Truth is the ultimate advantage 
because, if you have the truth, you can win out because— 
in a world where we’re all connected with social media and 
every other form through the web—we now live in a world 
where the truth will eventually get out. Now, if you go on 
the web, you can get every lie known to man as well. So 
the technology that empowers also can confuse. But I think 
there’s a resonance to the truth, as corny as it may sound, 
that every human being feels. You know when somebody’s 
bullshitting you. You know at some level it’s not the whole 
story. There’s something being held back. It’s instinctive 
in human beings. And not only do you take that and you 
magnify that with the interconnected world that we live in 
today in social media, now you’re at a place where if you 
don’t tell the truth, the consequences are just horrific.”

Tony Robbins

Today, May 10, was the 130th day of the year.  Naturally, I did the required 130 push-ups. Tomorrow, I’ll do 131.

And so on.

Team Adrenaline’s push-up challenge started live on New Year’s Day; the awesome fitness coach, Paul Caminiti, had come up with the idea some time in December, and participants like me committed to start at 55 push-ups each day, until day 56, February 25, when the daily allotment went up. Then 57, on day 57, and so on.

The end game, in all of this, will be on New Year’s Eve Day, December 31, 2015, when each one of us will accomplish 365 push-ups in the course of the day.

Someone in the group figured out that, today, we crossed over the 10,000 push-up count, year-to-date.

When I started working out with Team Adrenaline, push-ups of all kinds were integral, as were sprints, hill climbs, backward runs and other attributes of well-rounded fitness: balance, dexterity, speed, power and endurance. Organic, in that no equipment or machines are used, in a group rather than individual workouts, and the activity is outdoors, year-round. Exercise benefits from a group setting.  Counting a two-minute plank hold is more easily achievable by breaking it into manageable 10 or 15 second mental intervals.  Running 13.1 miles is manageable by thinking about it a mile at a time.

Similary, the push-ups are more manageable for me in sets of 20 or 30 or 45. But as the year goes on, it’s getting harder to fit those push-ups into morning before work and night time before bed.

I’m already getting sets of 40+ at a time done at the gas station while filling the tank.  And in the parking lot, waiting for restaurant take-out.  Eventually, they’ll spill into my work day.

 

The group Facebook page is full of photos and videos of push-up sets done creatively and in creative locations.  That will only increase as the job gets harder.  And the virtual group, it’s good for motivation.

I normally hate detailed, repetitive tasks.  In Adrenaline classes, being part of a group is a great source of positivism.  The social media aspect of what has been an otherwise solitary activity is a good substitute.

At work, online merchandising is a similarly detailed, repetitive task, and I approach it with the same dread as I do 130 push-ups.  But it has to be done.  Every individual vehicle deserves to have an accurate description, down to the factory color (is it Daytona orange, sunset orange or sunburst orange?), equipment and interior.  The photos have to be equally detailed. and all of the elements have to be syndicated to all inventory sites without loss of details.  Photo files, similarly, cannot be overly compressed to conserve server space, because picture quality suffers. My own vendors have compatibility issues, and I typically end up doing multiple entries to get transmission and interior colors correct.  I haven’t figured out what to do about the loss of photo details and the rise of compression artifacts, but I will.

Retail is detail.