The Carlton Hotel seems to be the place to meet up with people. This morning, I ran into Omnicom CEO John Wren and we had a nice conversation.
Gerry: Hi
John: Hello.
G: Can I have some money?
J: No.
G: Ok.
J:
G: Bye.
J: Bye.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Report from room 409
The Gutter Bar is right next to the Martinez Hotel. And if you're staying in a room in the front of the hotel there's this sound proof curtain you pull down to block the screaming and yelling that goes on until six in the morning. I would like to lodge a formal complaint against the Pierre Frey Rideaux Co. Your sound proof curtains do not work! I don't know if you know David Lubars, but if you did, you'd make your curtains thicker. We all love and enjoy the Neil Diamond classic "Sweet Caroline", but Jesus Christ.
Catching up with Jean-Marie Dru
I bumped into my old boss and good friend Jean-Marie Dru, former Worldwide CEO of TBWA at the Carlton Hotel terrace and got a chance to catch up.
Gerry: It’s good to see you again.
Jean-Marie: Very nice seeing you. How is Saatchi?
G: I’m not there anymore.
JM: Oh. I thought that’s where you went.
G: I did, but I quit a year ago. I started my own agency.
JM: Really? I didn’t know.
G: It was in all the trades.
JM: I read most of them, I didn’t see.
G: You must have missed that issue.
JM: In Adweek?
G: Yes
JM: Hmm. Adage?
G: Yes.
JM Shots?
G: Yes, a lot, most of them.
JM: I don’t recall seeing anything about you or an agency.
G: That’s funny.
JM: Why is it funny? It’s a little sad, no?
G: No.
JM: What is your agency called?
G: Barton F. Graf 9000.
JM: I’m sorry, what?
G: Barton F. Graf 9000
JM: That’s really the name?
G: Yes.
JM: Really?
G: Yes.
JM: Barton what?
G: Barton F. Graf 9000.
JM: Oh well.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Jose's Chocolate On My Lips
This is the French I know:
-Je suis enchante
-Ou est le bibliotheque
-Voila mon passport
-Ah, Gerard Depardieu
I’m practicing my French on the Delta flight, the good one that goes direct to Nice. I’m sitting in seat 27B, not even Economy Plus. But that’s what you get when you spend your own money. I can see through the curtain to Business Plus and Bob Greenberg is munching on his chocolate chip cookie and licking his lips and his fingers. Screw you RG! And your chocolaty fingers. Now he’s talking to the guy next to him, can’t see his face but by the swarthy slicked back hair I’m guessing it’s Jose Molla, and Bob is saying something. No! Jose, don’t give him your cookie, NO! Aww, Jose gave Bob his cookie. Bob’s got the biggest smile on his face eating Jose’s cookie. The rep sitting next to me just asked if I could stop leaning across his seat. AND YES, I SEE YOU READING MY BLOG POST AND I’M WRITING ABOUT YOU. Anyway. Bob knew I was back here. He could have given me Jose’s cookie. He’s got chocolate on his lips. Jose’s Chocolate is on Bob’s lips. I wish Jose’s chocolate was on my lips.
-Gerry
Monday, June 20, 2011
The Dude At TNT Knows.
You know who should get an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement In The Category Of Television Programming? The guy who picks out the TNT movie. That one movie that TNT buys and then runs everyday, four times a day, for the next two years. He’s a genius.
It started a long time ago with The Shawshank Redemption. That movie went basically unnoticed in theaters. It came out the same year as Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. But guess what happens when you put it on TV twice a day for two years? The dude at TNT knows. You realize that it’s way better than stupid Forrest Gump and even a little better then Pulp Fiction! And we’re talking about a movie that, on TV with commercials, is four hours long.
After we all watched Shawshank a billion times and TNT made a trillion bucks you know they asked the same guy to pick another movie. So then the dude decided it was time to show off and picked An American President. Seriously, An American President! And guess what happens the 1st, 14th and 37th time you flip to it? Somehow you watch it and enjoy it! I’m convinced young people aged 18 to 25 only know Richard Dreyfuss as ‘My name is Bob Rumson and I’m running for President!’
Anyways, this dude has a legacy of buying and constantly airing OK movies that become crazy good in our minds like A Time to Kill and The General’s Daughter. Yes, The General's Daughter. He should be honored. Seriously, someone look him up and we should make some type of plaque for him with wood and brass and engravings. Because trust me, one weekend this fall when the weather turns or you get a cold you’re going to sit on your couch and turn on The DaVinci Code or GI Jane ten minutes in. Then, three commercial-ridden hours later, you’re going to be like ‘that was really good’. Will you be right? It doesn’t even matter, because that guy at TNT was.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Balboa Beach Wraps Need Room To Billow
I was using Google analytics and I did some trend analysis on Scott Vitrone with surprising results. At first look, there was very little info to analyze, and knowing Scott and his wonderful work, this surprised me. Of course, I forgot that I live in this delusional bubble called advertising where we think just because someone made us laugh about multi-colored sugar candy that the entire world should not only bow down to him but his chief creative officer too. There are more important things to care about. But one of those things is definitely not people who run fashion shows in restaurants in the strip malls of Newport Beach. That is not more important and we should care about these people less than we care about advertising people. A strip mall restaurant is no place to highlight a breathtaking new line of causal beachwear. There simply is no strutting room. And the flowing pastels of a Balboa beach wrap need room to billow. That is fashion 101. It is an absurd over promise from a strip mall restaurateur and a blatant grasp for the limelight to try to convince a hardworking fashion designer that a front dining room would work and I have already given too many words about it.
So I should not have been surprised when the Google trend graph was blank when I attempted to analyze Vitrone. Except this huge spike in May of 2010. What? Where did that come from? Further research on what can hardly be called a blip, or even a spike, but a seismic upsurge in the graph, further research indicated all the trend info was coming from Milan, Italy. Huh? Did Vitrone fly to Milan in May of last year and strut down Via Vitruvio with that second shirt button naughtily undone? Is that what caused the graphic spire? Did someone stop him and say, you signore should design your own line of shirts. A line of men’s tops, Via Vitrone (pronounced Vi-troh-nay) Pour Homme, shirts designed with casual elegance where you don’t have to be insecure about undoing the second button because THERE ISN’T A SECOND BUTTON. The top button is the third button. Genius Scott. Genius. You should own that spike as well as the city that created it. But please, please listen to me. I know you want to showcase your talents somewhere. But please take great caution when approached by strip mall restaurant owners from Newport Beach. They will promise you the world, but THEY ARE PHONIES.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Vagabond Condensation and Spanish Galleons
I was raised in California. In the winters it sometimes dips into the high 50s, the summers are wildly pleasant and there is no such thing as humidity. So you could imagine my shock moving to New York City, where the summer heat and humidity evaporate and condensate the vagabond’s urine right at nose level and the winters are what the less experienced to such things might call the demonic storms of a frozen hell.
Throwing myself into such new meteorological experiences got me thinking about East Coasters, why they are where they are, and what I learned in school. Apparently, hundreds of years ago groups of Europeans risked their lives to sail west, cramped on small boats for months, in hopes of making it to a new land mass that they had heard might be there, maybe. And it just might be better then where they were coming from. Have you ever been to Madrid? Or Barcelona? These are fabulous places but, apparently, not fabulous enough. These picky people were taking a big risk and making a really bold move.
So, what did they do when they finally made it to a wide-open new land and experienced the suffocating humidity and frozen death storms? Instead of continuing west, the same people who sat in place on a boat for three months and ate their uncle’s poop (because he ate the biggest meal before they left) decided they had made it. ‘We’re here!’ they said, lying to themselves. They basically quit and in doing so, they quit on America.
But as school also taught me, some continued heading west. It wasn’t easy, but at least Thanksgiving had happened and the Indians gave them turkeys for their journey. These were the types of people who fell asleep asking themselves ‘Did I just risk my life spending three months in the hull of a tiny boat suckling on Uncle Steve’s poop for this kind of weather?’ And they woke up and yelled ‘No way!’ And their confused wives said ‘What are you yelling at?’ And they said ‘Just get in the car.’
But then another curious thing happened. A good number of these even-more-adventurous people who made it across an entire ocean and then began moving across an entire continent just decided to stop, right in the middle, and lied to themselves saying ‘We made it!’ And a guy said “No we haven’t!” and they killed him. There were no geographical indicators that they had made it anywhere. So the dead guy was right. Have you seen the Midwest? It’s just flat, in all directions, and there’s nothing. In fact, if you flip to a movie and see a car driving through such an area, or even an old western and see a wagon going across the plains, you know that movie has just started or, at best, is right in the middle and you want to see where the characters in the cars and wagons eventually end up because they certainly aren’t stopping where they are. It’s an entire region that is impossible to serve as the geographical conclusion to anything. And Vitrone, I don’t want to hear your Wizard of Oz argument.
My best hypothesis for this second wave of quitters was not learned in school, but rather from the rotating headlines on Yahoo.com which seems to do a story twice a week about morbidly obesity in America, and it turns out most of these people live in the Midwest. Now it’s one thing to sail across the sucky ocean and just flat out quit, but its quite another to continue moving west, get super fat from the Indians and their never ending supply of celebratory turkeys and just get lazy. A few months ago all these guys had were a couple of ounces of Uncle poop in their bellies, now they have stoked Indians shoving a never-ending supply of rotisserie turkeys in their face. I mean you can’t really blame them. But we will anyway.
Then there are the Californians. The few that made it all the way across the ocean, through the crappy East Coast weather and past all of the turkey and meat products to a place that probably looked as beautiful as that Avatar planet (the Avatar planet before the war with the humans, when that giant tree was still up). The type of people who weren’t about to settle for snowstorms or humidity, and probably just didn’t like turkey. One would assume these people, my people, would be the winners. But another trip to Yahoo.com’s rotating headlines proves one wrong.
Yesterday Yahoo reported that the median cost of a home in my hometown of Palo Alto has gone from 1 million to 1.6 million dollars since 2008, even as the rest of the country has tanked. Meaning that to enjoy the beautiful Avatar tree of California one must spend all the money that multiple jobs could ever muster up just to rent a single Avatar leaf to sleep on. Hardly a goal the poop-eating risk takers had in mind a few hundred years back.
So, unfortunately, my people lose. And the winners aren’t the East Coasters either. They’d laugh at the Californians, but their rent is almost the same plus laughing at anything is hard when there’s 90% humidity and your lungs are half-full of evaporated hobo pee.
It turns out the Midwesterners come out on top. Their strong personal motivation coupled with their love of turkey meat has left them at the perfect quitting point. In sprawling eight bedroom homes on three acre lots with eight hundred dollar monthly mortgages and all the left over cash they need to go crazy on the dollar menus. So notch another hole in your 52-inch belt middle America, your love of slightly decent weather and rotisserie-styled anything has gotten you to a much better place than Barcelona.
Throwing myself into such new meteorological experiences got me thinking about East Coasters, why they are where they are, and what I learned in school. Apparently, hundreds of years ago groups of Europeans risked their lives to sail west, cramped on small boats for months, in hopes of making it to a new land mass that they had heard might be there, maybe. And it just might be better then where they were coming from. Have you ever been to Madrid? Or Barcelona? These are fabulous places but, apparently, not fabulous enough. These picky people were taking a big risk and making a really bold move.
So, what did they do when they finally made it to a wide-open new land and experienced the suffocating humidity and frozen death storms? Instead of continuing west, the same people who sat in place on a boat for three months and ate their uncle’s poop (because he ate the biggest meal before they left) decided they had made it. ‘We’re here!’ they said, lying to themselves. They basically quit and in doing so, they quit on America.
But as school also taught me, some continued heading west. It wasn’t easy, but at least Thanksgiving had happened and the Indians gave them turkeys for their journey. These were the types of people who fell asleep asking themselves ‘Did I just risk my life spending three months in the hull of a tiny boat suckling on Uncle Steve’s poop for this kind of weather?’ And they woke up and yelled ‘No way!’ And their confused wives said ‘What are you yelling at?’ And they said ‘Just get in the car.’
But then another curious thing happened. A good number of these even-more-adventurous people who made it across an entire ocean and then began moving across an entire continent just decided to stop, right in the middle, and lied to themselves saying ‘We made it!’ And a guy said “No we haven’t!” and they killed him. There were no geographical indicators that they had made it anywhere. So the dead guy was right. Have you seen the Midwest? It’s just flat, in all directions, and there’s nothing. In fact, if you flip to a movie and see a car driving through such an area, or even an old western and see a wagon going across the plains, you know that movie has just started or, at best, is right in the middle and you want to see where the characters in the cars and wagons eventually end up because they certainly aren’t stopping where they are. It’s an entire region that is impossible to serve as the geographical conclusion to anything. And Vitrone, I don’t want to hear your Wizard of Oz argument.
My best hypothesis for this second wave of quitters was not learned in school, but rather from the rotating headlines on Yahoo.com which seems to do a story twice a week about morbidly obesity in America, and it turns out most of these people live in the Midwest. Now it’s one thing to sail across the sucky ocean and just flat out quit, but its quite another to continue moving west, get super fat from the Indians and their never ending supply of celebratory turkeys and just get lazy. A few months ago all these guys had were a couple of ounces of Uncle poop in their bellies, now they have stoked Indians shoving a never-ending supply of rotisserie turkeys in their face. I mean you can’t really blame them. But we will anyway.
Then there are the Californians. The few that made it all the way across the ocean, through the crappy East Coast weather and past all of the turkey and meat products to a place that probably looked as beautiful as that Avatar planet (the Avatar planet before the war with the humans, when that giant tree was still up). The type of people who weren’t about to settle for snowstorms or humidity, and probably just didn’t like turkey. One would assume these people, my people, would be the winners. But another trip to Yahoo.com’s rotating headlines proves one wrong.
Yesterday Yahoo reported that the median cost of a home in my hometown of Palo Alto has gone from 1 million to 1.6 million dollars since 2008, even as the rest of the country has tanked. Meaning that to enjoy the beautiful Avatar tree of California one must spend all the money that multiple jobs could ever muster up just to rent a single Avatar leaf to sleep on. Hardly a goal the poop-eating risk takers had in mind a few hundred years back.
So, unfortunately, my people lose. And the winners aren’t the East Coasters either. They’d laugh at the Californians, but their rent is almost the same plus laughing at anything is hard when there’s 90% humidity and your lungs are half-full of evaporated hobo pee.
It turns out the Midwesterners come out on top. Their strong personal motivation coupled with their love of turkey meat has left them at the perfect quitting point. In sprawling eight bedroom homes on three acre lots with eight hundred dollar monthly mortgages and all the left over cash they need to go crazy on the dollar menus. So notch another hole in your 52-inch belt middle America, your love of slightly decent weather and rotisserie-styled anything has gotten you to a much better place than Barcelona.
-Eric Kallman
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