Scott McKay is a Toronto writer, creative director, brand response specialist, relatively patient manager, half-baked photographer and forcibly retired playwright.
This little site is designed to introduce him and his thoughts to the world. (Whether the world appreciates the intro is another matter.) If you'd like to chat, then you can guess what the boxes below are for.
It's way past being the cool thing to do, but I can't get past the gnawing feeling that for the betterment of my site traffic and overall digital cool, I should be liveblogging Mad Men, or at least regularly reacting to it in some way.
But I just don't give a shit.
Don't get me wrong; I actually quite like the show. The writing has terrific depth, the characters and actors are very strong, and the art direction is brilliant. I watched it very intermittently for the first three seasons, but the end of season three grabbed me and I've seen most of the current season so far.
I don't care about the minutiae of it; I don't obsess about it from minute to minute, or show to show, like the best bloggers seem to. And I can't write coherently while being involved in watching something with anything like close attention. I'm not sure anyone can actually write decently in those circumstances.
Besides, the show's not about advertising, is it. Advertising is just a convenient bag o' metaphors for playing with identity, reality, sexuality, TV, alcoholism and other fun stuff. It's a glamorous and sexy environment in which to watch people being stripped of everything they have, and losing all the things that make them who they are.
Mad Men is looking more and more to me like the Book of Job. And Elihu really isn't someone I want to imitate.
Our whole job as creatives is to make work that will solve the client's business problem – smart work, great work, yes, but work that will work. I look at every brief confident that my team and I can not just solve the problem but knock it out of the park. But the work doesn't sell itself when you try to push it across the table at the client; you have to find the key to selling it, thinking about the people whom you are selling it to and their needs. How do you set it up? What theme do you keep coming back to?
Both the work and the selling are essential. Not even Don Draper can sell shit. (Okay, haven't seen every episode; maybe there's one where he is in fact the superhuman creative director.)
And when you apparently can't unlock the key to the brief after repeated attempts, or can't sell what seems to be a great idea or two, then I suppose you re-evaluate, and you learn something, but you make yourself because that's the only way to deal with the fact that you've failed.
Now that Top Gear seems to be blinking in and out of regular weekday airing on BBC Canada, I find myself with a little more time to do things in the evening like, well, think.
And one of the things I've been grappling with is the survival of direct mail in the age of social media. How can this strange 19th century habit of writing people letters and having them delivered by a government monopoly as an advertising medium continue to survive through a second century of dizzying technological change?
Since its inception, generations have grown up having ready access to a startlingly interactive technology called telephony. Radio, TV, comic books, PowerPoint and Facebook have all in turn destroyed the minds and reading skills of our culture's young people.
They still see their name at the top of that piece of paper and are drawn in. They still feel as if some one person has actually sat down and composed a piece of correspondence to them.
Personal revelation: I find myself having this personal, one-to-one feeling sometimes even when I myself have written the client letter I'm looking at. It makes no sense, but's happened. And I know other writers who have also had this experience.
The letter format is damned powerful.
Now, I'm not claiming that DM letters will beat down the Internet in popularity any time soon. But done well, with a relevant message and an emotional conenction, direct mail does something that I think is actually quite difficult to do digitally – allow a brand to make a personal connection with someone for at least a few seconds. The recipient actually holds your message in their hands as they make a decision to open your envelope, or not.
Direct mails offers a physical experience of a brand and a moment of focus on it that is increasingly rare: PVR increasingly makes TV ads a hit and miss proposition; the proliferation of outdoor makes any single message weaker (as Howard Gossage feared); if you're like me you never even open most emails, seeing them only in the preview pane; and the only things anyone trusts on Facebook come from your friends, not brands. (Or they have to be really cool, gross or funny.)
I know that digital already dominates the continuum of marketing. It's where and how consumers speak to each other, and speak with brands or experiences that they like. And I think that's a good thing; the immediacy and empowerment that the Internet has brought to millions of people are tremendous benefits that can't ever be changed.
But as I've said before, that doesn't mean that direct mail is dead. When done well it is working, still, even with young audiences you might not expect. Simply parroting the expression that "no one reads any more" is not sufficient reason for killing off something that is working.
Let's acknowledge that direct mail will live on as a unique way of reaching people. It will never be as prevalent as it once was, but neither is radio, and radio continues to exist as a powerful marketing tool. The Internet will not kill TV, but it is changing it and will continue to do so.
Unlike old soldiers, old technologies don't die or fade away. They simply find smaller, more profitable niches.
You likely don't know the name of the man in the above picture.
He's one of "those guys." You know, those actors who are familiar somehow, but you can't place the role, and definitely can't place the name.
James Hong is perhaps the greatest of "those guys" simply because he's been in a few things you may have seen over the years. Like the Chinese Restaurant episode of Seinfeld. Bones. Kung Fu Panda. The King of Queens. The X-Files. Big Trouble in Little China. Miami Vice. Blade Runner. Dynasty. The Dukes of Hazard. Dallas. Airplane! The Rockford Files. All in the Family. Chinatown. Hawaii Five-O. Mission Impossible. Perry Mason. Bonanza. Dragnet. Godzilla. (Yes, he dubbed a part in the U.S. release of the original Godzilla. Doesn't count for facial recognition, but still.)
According to Wikipedia he's had over 500 roles in his career, and a scan of Hong's IMDB page tells me that he has literally worked every year since 1955.
1955!
He has worked consistently for 55 years as an actor.
Other people have been acting for a long time, but they have gaps of a few years here and there; the phone stops ringing and it takes you a few years to get onto a daytime soap, or a sitcom, or if the mortgage is really late, a reality show.
Not James Hong. I've never seen a résumé anywhere near as consistent as his; a few credits each and every year, some in front of the camera, some voicework, some big roles, some small, some villians – but every year.
He seems to have been one of the few Asian actors that Hollywood casting directors of the '50s and '60s called on, year after year, like Jack Soo, Mako and Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, for the standard Asian roles: laundry owners, bellboys, restaurants owners, gangsters, Chinese Communists. And while Hollywood's caricatures may have slowly disappeared over the years (or not), the writing and the roles seem to have gotten a little more interesting for him, or at least provided some variety and consistent income while he did things like helping to found one of the first Asian-American theatre companies.
Today James Hong runs an acting school and is still working: he has two films in post-production, and one TV series shooting, while I write this.
That's pretty amazing. We should all be so lucky to do what we love that much, that consistently.
I said that you can't just suffer through it, you actually have to use it to your advantage. Let me explain with a personal example.
Follow me back to the late 80s, to some theatres around the University of Toronto, for some student productions in which I did not play leading roles. We're talking the Marshal in the Crucible, and the Provost in the Measure for Measure – you know, boring, law-abiding and law-enforcing characters with not a lot of complexity, nuance or words to say.
Yet I couldn't eat for hours before going on stage. Although I knew my lines, I was obsessed with the idea that I would get out in front of the audience and blank on the first word I was supposed to say. I would walk around in a trance backstage, brain and nerves totally seized up, before jumping into the abyss when it was my cue. That was fear. And it wasn't good.
My next experience in theatre happened to be in advertising, in my first couple of presentations at my first agency. They were nowhere near as bad as my undergrad thespianism, but not dissimilar. I'd obsess for hours; it wasn't healthy. But at least I'd figured out the key, which is that presentation is theatre.
And with every presentation, I naturally got more relaxed. I calmed down, and began to lose the obsession, and be able to eat before meetings. Once I even lost the fear entirely.
And that presentation without fear sucked bigtime.
Although we're conditioned to think about fear as a negative, whenever I haven't felt fear going into a presentation, that presentation has sucked. And belated I have learned from this.
Fear is what gives you energy. Fear is what makes you aware. Fear is what makes you listen, and makes you think about what your first line is going to be.
I first read Dune in high school, near the end of my science fiction phase, and while I didn't love it, there was something about it that interested me. Yes, it was maybe the first time that a popular novel dealt with the idea of ecological process, that one change in an environment could affect so much else around it, and that was cool. And the long view of history that the novel laid out was also appealing to someone who loved the Foundation trilogy and the stories from Heinlein's Future History.
But not a lot really stuck with me, in spite of the fact that I've re-read it a couple of times since. It's ponderous and overblown and the characters are as two-dimensional as Flatland. (It doesn't help that the film version is awful; I think David Lynch intentionally tanked it simply to get Blue Velvet made.) With hundreds of untouched books in my house, Dune isn't on my list to reread again.
But goofily, one flat and unremarkable sentence from the thing has actually stayed in my mind over the years. It occurs when Paul Atreides is duelling or fighting or something (it's just not worth my time to look up) and he starts to panic, only to remember the Bene Gesserit language his mother has taught him:
"Fear is the mind killer."
I know it's not a compelling thought; and as a sentence it just lays there. But, when you're starting to panic, about to, say, go into a client meeting that could easily go very badly, it's been for me a very handy thing to remember. Retaining your ability to think when you're presenting (or being chastised or negotiating) is absolutely vital, especially when you're someone like me who has from day one had to fight an innate desire to simply push the work across the table, say "like it?" then run like hell.
The fear never goes away; not for me, not when I'm about to present. But you have to be able to function in spite of it, maybe even with it, and maybe even use the fear to your advantage.
Sitting in the stands near Pesky's Pole on Friday night as the Blue Jays were cruising to an extremely pleasant 16-2 throttling of the Red Sox, I was actually a lot more interested in watching Red Sox fans than the game itself.
One reason? American sports fans are different than Canadian fans; more knowledgeable, more passionate, more vocal, and more likely to be female. (Completely anecdotally, I saw far more women not with men but with other women or on their own at Fenway than I have ever seen at any professional sporting event in Toronto.)
One of the more interesting groups was a gaggle of jock-ular ex-frat boys in front of us. They were betting each other on the action of every half-inning, talking trash to Jose Bautista and fetching each other beer in an almost continuous stream of motion. The fetching meant that every couple of minutes, one of them would come back from the beverage taps with a couple of cups of beer and manage to jump some seat backs while not spilling a drop of liquid.
The fact that they could almost always get back into their seats without having their neighbours stand up or move got me thinking about the layout of the seating in that section, as opposed to say the seating at Skydome (sorry, Rogers Centre) or ACC.
For instance, we were sitting in a row with extra leg room, half again the typical width of a row. This meant that people could easily get by us, and us by other people. And the reason this made a difference to our entire section, and not just our row, was that instead of a few super-wide aisles spaced very far apart (think Skydome) our section was criss-crossed with lots of narrow aisles (maybe less than the width of a seat) about every 10 seats. So it was always fairly easy to get in and out of your seat; beer runs and the subsequent washroom runs (um, let's say "trips" instead) did not involve having 15 people gather up their belongings while you were forced to rub your body parts on theirs as you inched by, praying that they wouldn't spill anything on you because you stepped on their foot. Again, if you've been to a Blue Jays game anytime since 1989, you know what I'm talking about.
(And given the Red Sox current payroll, I can't imagine that this seating design has a serious impact on revenue, via a loss of seating.)
I don't know if this is an original feature of Fenway, or a result of the renovations earlier this decade, but it's so simple and so smart that it's breathtaking. It's like the person who thought this up had actually been to a baseball game and realized that people actually do drink and piss during the game.
It wasn't the apex of the experience or anything, but the seating design was something that allowed us and everyone else to focus on the game and have fun and not resent every idiot who no longer forced us to stand up and try not to spill and block the view of everyone behind us. Which is not true of, say, a game at Skydome.
Reality should be a basic principle of design, digital, experiential or otherwise. Don't design to what you think people will do, or think they might do.
Tonight my life (okay, my mood) was saved by the inexplicable The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! Inexplicable because I just can't imagine anyone with money actually agreeing to finance a movie that's aggressively weird, chock full of in-jokes and pretty much guaranteed to not appeal to a mass audience.
It's not easy to encapsulate in a quick synopsis. There are some evil aliens called Lectroids who steal something Buckaroo (who is a physicist/neurosurgeon/racecar driver/rockstar) has been working on called the overthruster so they can go back to their home planet and reconquer it, only the good Lectroids get in touch with Buckaroo...
What matters are the details. For instance, all the Lectroids are named John Something, as in John Bigbooty (pronounced Big-boo-TAY), John Smallberries, John Yaya, in order to fit in seamlessly on Earth. The President looks exactly Orson Welles. John Lithgow as the head rebel, Dr. Emilio Lizardo, is about as out of control as it's possible to get on a movie set. The rest of the cast is full of brilliant folks like Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli who never got the kind of recognition they should have. And the writing is full of gems, like this call and response between Lithgow in full Hitlerian mode and a factory full of Lectroids:
"Where are we going?" bellows Lithgow.
"Planet 10!"
"When?"
"Real soon!"
I saw it a couple of times when it came out, in theatres that were nowhere near half full. Which was too bad for the writer and director, and for the producer.
But its distastrous run somehow just deepened my love for it.
First, it suggests that Machiavelli had it wrong and that nice guys actually do finish first, in the sense that those who backstab and play politics tend to become isolated and ostracized fairly quickly in groups. Huzzah. Good news, right?
Second, those who do rise to power become less like themselves and tend to become less sensitive and responsive to others, becoming more and more sure of themselves and their own opinions.
Ack.
Most people who become boss-types don't want to become insensitive asses. (Even these people didn't intend to be bad.) But the research suggests that this trend is a function of becoming isolated from day-to-day activities, which any senior manager has to be in order to allow their team to work. Distance is not good, but it is necessary.
Which is a pretty damn delicate thing to be balanced, one that gets increasingly difficult the higher up you go.
Just be careful about putting those feet on the desk, and who you point them at.
It's easy for us direct response folk to get fooled by cool. Yes, we want results, but we also want to do amazing ground-breaking work. We want awards. We want to be funny. We want millions of views on Youtube. And we view work, even direct response work, through that lens.
By that standard, the most effective and perhaps longest running TV spot in Canadian history doesn't measure up.
Yes. "It's Patrick, he bought life insurance!"
When it aired, it was pretty mainstream in terms of the clothes, the lighting, the announcer-y stuff, so it didn't feel like the museum piece it does to you now. But it sure as hell didn't break any ground culturally or artistically. (For some reason, I think it was adapted from Belgian creative.)
It just made so much money for Norwich Union insurance that they kept running it, year after year; the variations and tests ran well into this millennium. It was mind-bogglingly successful.
Why? I can only hypothesize a weird combination of things. It's built on classic direct response structure with straighforward technique; it's a tutorial in how to do a DRTV spot. But it's not the only spot in history that's been well-executed, so that can't explain everything.
I think it's the small hiccups that actually stuck with people, and made it memorable: the quickness and bizarre excitement with which the first guy says the immortal words, "It's Patrick, he bought life insurance." (Has anyone ever had a personal conversation that started out with insurance?) The way the Asian Canadian testimonial woman jumps in and cuts off her husband as he talks. The way the announcer's "2" in the "20" he scrawls on the whiteboard seems so rushed and sad. Maybe it's just me, but details like that remind me of the Sham-Wow spot; very strong selling with just enough personality and weirdness to be memorable.
The only thing I can compare to it is that Canadian Tire "creepy neighbour" campaign early this decade with the couple who explained products – mini-infomercials really. People seemed to hate those damn things, they got made fun of mercilessly by shows like This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Air Farce. Yet the flipside of that is that everyone knew them, everyone watched and knew the products. They look to CT for information, and went to CT when they wanted to buy. I have no data of course, but I've read CT folks saying that they worked insanely well.
CT ended the campaign because they wanted to be cooler, oh, I'm sorry, more "relevant"; I'm sure the CEO got sick of his/her family and neighbours making fun of them. So we've seen a couple of campaigns since they ended the "creepy neighbour", and maybe a couple of different agencies. Yeah, cool worked really well, didn't it?
I know the creative team who did the Norwich Union spots; amazing people all of whom I've worked with and for, and from whom I've learned virtually everything I know about direct marketing, direct mail, and DRTV. And yet none of them talks much about it, and I don't think any of them list it on their résumés, or have it in their books.
Which is sad, but I understand why. Cool, not effectiveness, still seems to rule.
Sunday, September 5, 2010 at 9:48PM 
It's way past being the cool thing to do, but I can't get past the gnawing feeling that for the betterment of my site traffic and overall digital cool, I should be liveblogging Mad Men, or at least regularly reacting to it in some way.
