Rich Mintz  

I’m reading this profile of Carrie Brownstein, one of the two people (with Fred Armisen) behind “Portlandia,” and I find this passage about Brownstein’s earlier life is needling me:

Thinking that an office job might be a good thing to try, she did a six-month stint at Weiden+Kennedy — the modish Portland ad agency responsible for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. (The agency’s playcentric workplace has been spoofed on “Portlandia.”) But working at an ad agency proved alienating, she said, because of the way “the work mimics art.” She added, “Music, to me, is an earnest populist endeavor and this was a cynical populist one.”

I respect Brownstein, love her work, and know what she’s getting at, of course — anyone who’s ever been asked by a client, “Can’t you just make us one of them ‘viral videos’ and be done with it?” knows the difference between genuine art (or even honest craftsmanship) and a pig with pretty lipstick on it. But I’ve spent much of the past twenty years finding a way to be professionally successful in an agency career, while still feeling that my genuine creativity is one of the things the market is rewarding. And many of the people I work with daily, at Blue State Digital and elsewhere would say the same. And that list of people includes some of those I most admire for their genuine creative energy.

On this blog you’ve seen me struggle with formal and informal creative exercises (like The Artist’s Way program). Arguably one point of this blog is to give me a creative outlet that’s “untainted” by the market, although much of what I write about is connected to my professional life; it’s hard to separate the strands. But the richest creative encounters I’ve had in my adult life have come through my work. I’ve met people who are generative, uncompromising, and blessed with the power of vision, and not just a handful, but many of them. I’ve taken lessons from each of those traits, from each of those people, and those lessons have helped me not just in my work, but in my life.

The creativity I’ve experienced in agency people isn’t second-class. It’s real. There are people in the advertising business who are “real” creatives and yet who thrive on the pragmatism of the work, the fact that it can’t all be vision but must be vision with purpose. Just as the constraints of the sonnet form liberated Shakespeare to write some of the finest poetry in English, and the laws of physics liberated Thomas Edison to envision new devices that actually worked, in the very same way the need to sell more sneakers or generate more museum memberships or influence more voters liberates these people to build castles in the air that people want to own and live in.

It’s an eternal tension in art and indeed in craft, that between faithfulness to vision and practicality of product. But it is a tension, and even in art, being able to produce something that people want to experience matters. Otherwise, what’s the point? Some artists are happy creating for themselves; others are more motivated by the sense of fulfillment they feel when the audience loves their work, embraces it, does with it what they envisioned would be done. The first type of creativity isn’t more genuine than the second. We all have all these impulses woven together into our creative selves.

“Remarketing” is the phenomenon by which a retailer or commercial business that you’ve visited online (but not yet purchased from) chases you around the Internet encouraging you to come back and buy whatever it was that you were looking at.

To those of you (and I realize there may be a few) who don’t work in the Internet marketing industry, this may seem like an appalling invasion of privacy — “how do they know who I am?” but, within the bounds of the degree of anonymity that’s de facto accepted on the Internet, it makes sense. They don’t actually know who you are; they (or, more precisely, Google, which is serving up your ads) simply know which computer and browser are yours, and they contract with Google to serve ads to you later. (I’m not an expert in this by any means, I just generally understand how it works.) The ads show up on whatever page you happen to be visiting later: as you can see above, a Dragon Dictate ad followed me to YouTube.

It’s simple and brilliant, and in the right circumstances it is cost-effective — the ads perform better than the retailer’s other ads, and help them close sales that would have been lost. We at BSD have not used it extensively, but we’ve tried it, and seen it work, and others are reporting the same thin. Which is probably why I’m seeing a huge uptick in remarketing in recent weeks.

Just in the last 24 hours, that I noticed, I’ve been remarketed by Dragon Dictate, Google Chromebooks (or perhaps it’s Samsung doing the marketing), and Nau jackets, three product websites that I did indeed visit.

Often, as a potential consumer, I kind of like this. It keeps bringing my mind back to the whatever-it-is I was considering buying. The Chromebook remarketing ads might actually push me over the edge to buying a Chromebook. On the other hand, no matter how many times Nuance reminds me to buy Dragon Dictate, I won’t — because I already did, from Nuance, two weeks ago, from this very same browser! So someone needs to do a bit of tweaking.

Below are some photos of the Rich Mintz Historical Site known as “1900 Quail Street,” in the light-industrial northern reaches of Newport Beach, practically Costa Mesa, hard by the unsexy private-plane underbelly of John Wayne Airport. In this building I learned much of what I knew about direct marketing in the early part of my career (roughly 1992-1994).

Here I also learned about: crappy commutes (I lived in West Hollywood and commuted an hour each way with a friend via the carpool lane), office politics (when some people a few years older than me left the company unexpectedly, I got sucked into the vacuum and had to learn things very quickly), business travel (Detroit! Houston! St. Louis!), the importance of alcohol to a successful office Christmas party, and many other valuable lessons.

You probably can’t tell, but this place has had a full makeover in the past few years and it looks VASTLY more trendy and sophisticated and fabulous than it did in 1992. So, um, just imagine.

(Crossposted from the Americans for the Arts Blog.)

I’m in San Diego this week for the Americans for the Arts Convention, which kicked off at noon today with a welcome by president Bob Lynch and a keynote address by California social-activist legend Bobby Shriver.

This is my fourth Americans for the Arts event in two years. Heading for my first (the 2009 National Arts Marketing Project conference in Providence), I was afraid I’d feel out of place. If you know me, you know I’m not exactly shy, but I’ve always been a little scared of arts people. They tend to be so sure of themselves, and bubbling over with ideas, and I’m just, you know, a businessman — on the creative end of the spectrum for a businessman, to be sure, but nevertheless…

But I had no reason to worry.

One thing about arts people is that they love talking about ideas. And the ideas that might help them get more people to experience and enjoy art, or advocate for arts funding and education, or donate to support the arts in their own communities — well, those are the ideas they love talking about most of all. And it just so happens that those are the kinds of ideas we at Blue State Digital trade in, so everything worked out fine.

Another thing about arts people is that they remember you. Whether artist or arts administrator or community arts activist, they are fundamentally social people. They can’t help it. Every person they meet is a potential artsgoer or arts donor or arts voter or arts enjoyer, and they are passionate about the arts, and so they take every relationship seriously.  Plus, if they’re artists, they want you to LOVE THEIR ART and they will probably keep trying to get you to love it until you do. I still think of myself as on the fringe of the arts community, not in the center of it. But this community is delighted to embrace anyone who takes the arts seriously, and I certainly do, so I suppose I qualify. And as a result, each Americans for the Arts event I attend is more like a reunion with old friends.

And a third thing about arts people is — well, Lord have mercy, can they party!  The opening reception at last year’s Convention in Baltimore was mindblowing — good-natured and fun, food and drink, singers with a bang-up band, a dress-up table (there is a photo of me wearing a Maryland crab hat now floating around the Internet that dates from that party), and uncommonly social. No wallflowers in that kind of environment.

Plus, hello! Last year’s party was held IN A MUSEUM, and we’re not talking your grandmother’s museum, either — we’re talking the American Visionary Art Museum in Federal Hill, which, if you don’t know it — well, just click the link.  If your most entertaining old uncle (the one with the old locomotive in his garage) got together with the landscape designer who laid out your garden, and your mom’s hairdresser, and a six-year-old girl, and you gave them a million dollars and said “Make a museum,” they couldn’t come up with a more interesting one than this. The only thing it doesn’t have is unicorns, and if they see this blog post they’ll probably have some in there by tomorrow. Highly recommended, that museum. Highly recommended for all ages.  (Oh, and you should see the gift shop…)

Tonight’s opening reception is at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego — a different kind of museum, but then again San Diego is a different kind of place. From the leaked details I’m privy to, tonight’s party promises to be just as much fun.  Oops, look at the time — it’s almost time to wash my face, straighten my tie, slick back my hair, and catch the trolley.  See you at the party!

Claire Cain Miller’s long profile of Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz is business journalism at its very best: engaging and readable, telling a story, packed with snippets of intelligence I hadn’t known despite my having kept an eye on the Starbucks story.

(My favorite bit of color from Miller’s story: apparently all the CEOs in America are friends. Schultz is pals with Michael Dell, and it was on a long bike ride with him in Hawaii that Schultz began developing the rebound plan. The CEO of J. Crew emailed Schultz with a store complaint, and Schultz answered personally.)

For all the things I don’t much like about Starbucks, they’ve brought a level of consistency (in the best sense) to both their coffee and their atmosphere that is easy for urbanites to sniff at, but extremely valuable in places where there wasn’t an indigenous coffee-oriented “third place” culture before Starbucks arrived. And that describes much of America.

I’m happy to see Schultz taking the company’s problems seriously. Although I rarely visit Starbucks for the coffee or food, I do buy my daily newspaper in one down the block, so I have occasion to watch the company’s transformation. I generally like the company’s recent improvements and innovations, starting with the vast improvement in food offerings (including both snack and mealtime options) that has swept the chain in the past two years. Time was (and not long ago) that most baked goods at Starbucks were nearly inedible, and overpriced at that. But in the recent revamp, quality, price, variety, and freshness have all improved. A year ago, I would have said that British chains like Caffè Nero and Costa Coffee offered consistently better baked goods and snacky foods than Starbucks, but Starbucks is catching up.

I don’t much like the over-roasted coffee or the mainstream drinks (sugary and artificial, they are). But they’re paying attention to this, too, and in most stores there’s a bean blend in one of their brewed-coffee urns that I can tolerate — and it’s always, always hot and fresh, even in their licensed locations in airport terminals. Given the swill that is often called coffee in America, even here in New York, that’s not nothing.

Today was Yellow Pages Day in Manhattan — that public holiday of long standing in which elves scurry about throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning, depositing identical yellow books, shrinkwrapped in groups of six, on doorsteps throughout the land.

I passed several of these parcels, unwanted and unloved, on my walk from the subway to work this morning. I even momentarily fingered a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book, thinking “I should take this home, maybe I’ll need it.” Then I stopped myself. For what? What could possibly be in that book that I can’t find more quickly, search for more effectively, evaluate more usefully online? I set it down, walked into the office… and found a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book already sitting in the office recycling bin.

Like the landline that it once existed to serve, the Yellow Pages is on its way out. Even nine years ago (!), when I was trying to promote my fledgling bookstore, the ad salespeople were already desperate. (I didn’t bite. What they were charging was ridiculous, and even in 2002 the Yellow Pages already felt “over.”) Now they must be apoplectic from the stench of their own imminent obsolescence. This is a business that still exists only because certain parties (ad salespeople, printing companies, certain types of traditional businesses and conservative businesspeople) are locked in a cycle of mutual addiction and denial, reinforced by a dollop of voodoo and magical thinking. Of all the types of advertising your small business could possibly pay for in the current environment, the Yellow Pages must be one of the least trackable, and it’s certainly one of the least nimble.

Which is why you saw things like this on the street today in Manhattan:

The first three photos above were taken about 7pm, roughly 15 hours after the elves made the last of their deliveries. That last photo was taken at midnight (approaching 24 hours after dropoff) in the lobby of an apartment building. I repeat: in almost 24 hours, nobody in this 10-unit apartment building took a copy. To the constituency allegedly intended to consume it (whose consumption of it is the product being sold to advertisers), this product is literally worth nothing. Why is this thing still being produced again?

Brilliant, just brilliant! FreshDirect, the Queens-based gourmet-ish grocery delivery operation, packages a “Fruit Ripening Bag” with its fresh fruit. Otherwise known as a “bag,” it is printed with instructions for using it to ripen your fruit. (Said instructions more or less reduce to: “Place fruit in bag. When ripe, remove.”)

And thus FreshDirect turns something that costs them 2.4 cents apiece into a valuable customer-retention amenity!