Tag: advertising

Happy Belated and Joyous Birthday James!

Yesterday was James Patterson’s birthday. He is a monster author. And why not? I know where he came from. Same place I did. Advertising. We both were creatives in the New York ad biz. I understand the approach to story that comes from the discipline to get a message out in only 75 words or less. Thirty seconds of broadcast time that educates, motivates, and ends with a call to action, while wrapped around a USP device.

We shook hands once, at a Borders conference when my first book and his 14,345th title was coming out. I exaggerate, but like I said he’s a monster. But in point of fact, he’s a brand! Good for him!

I spend a lot of time helping good writers to become authors. Ultimately the next stop after author is BRAND. And if your brand gets big enough, your style can take a back seat. You may continue it or freely move around the literary Ouija board, without fear of rejection because your brand sells the book. He has been successful in many genres: romance novels, historical fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and science fiction. 

But for the rest of us mere mortals, hammering out 85,000 words or so, into a compelling, satisfying manuscript is the immediate task before us, on the way to potentially becoming a brand. To that end it helps to find the common ground with those whose names are above the title, we all face the blank page. We all have no idea if what we are composing will be a great symphony or a one hit wonder. Branding aside, every book stands alone, even those in a series. So how to succeed in authoring a novel? I believe the answer is…

“I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It’s very disciplined, yes, but it’s joy for me.” – James Patterson

That’s one more thing that I share with Mr. Patterson, and I am sure with nearly every successful author, we both consider writing a joy. Finding joy, is the key to facing that page, working out the plot, defining and building character and tying out the resolution of a brilliant conflict. Sheer Joy!

I can’t teach Joy. But when I see it in a student, I know we are more than halfway along to a better, manuscript. In a word, the whole process becomes a… joy!

Oh, one more thing, the New York Ad shop where I was a creative director/senior VP for 40 years, was Sid Paterson Advertising. No relation, and only one ‘T.’

THE DEEP FAKERY BAKERY

Way, way, back in 1981 B.C. (before cellphones), Michael Crichton, who brought us Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, dabbled in a slice of cake from the deep fakery bakery. It was a little-known movie called Looker. As was his theme, it was a cautionary sci-fi tale ala, “don’t f*ck with Mother Nature or the dinosaurs will come back and eat you.”

Only this time, the evildoers in the movie were trying to out engineer Mother Nature. Notably by creating the perfect advertising spokesmodel. Today we call that a (say it with me) Av-a-tar. It was all blamed on those evil men who sell you what you don’t want by fear and intimidation or, as they were known then, Advertising Execs. (Full disclosure I was a Creative Director Ad Exec at an NYC ad shop for years.) 

In the search for the perfect human form with which to lull viewers into buying whatever comes out of her perfect lips or whatever she was holding in her perfect hands, they made the perfect female spokesperson. Of course, they did this by first finding the most nearly perfect, most stunning woman on the planet. Then in a bit of 1980’s sci-fi wizardry, they did something they called ‘scanning them’ into a massive computer and then fixed Mother Nature’s mistakes. You know, the nose is 1 millimeter longer than the prescribed perfect one, the chin – a centimeter back, the eyes a fraction of an inch wider apart. You know, “perfection.” Of course, the one thorny little issue this created was: who needed this multimillion-dollar deep fake when the real one was available at $1000 per hour? Their Hi-tech solution? Kill the real flesh and blood lookers so that only their avatars “lived.”

This is why today, I have sleepless nights worrying about Tom Cruise. I wonder if he can hear the clock ticking? Tik Tok, Tik Tok.

Just like practically every war movie ever made, except the studio blockbusters and those actually made during World War Two, they were all subtextually anti-war films. I didn’t realize it then when I was a kid, but the messaging was ingrained. 

In that same manner, my high-tech thrillers deliver anti-tech underpinnings. My motto and question for all these cutting-edge programmers and digital innovators, and for technology in general, is, Just because we can, should we?  Noooobody ever asks this. The people with the power to make Tom Cruise perform Macbeth in Swahili in a Sherman tank wearing a tutu on the planet Mars with 100% believability and acceptance by the masses, never say… “Hey, wait a minute, do we actually need this?” In the hallowed halls of the Technosphere, there isn’t an anthropologist or a humanist. There’s no one to speak for the soon-to-be enslaved billions. Slaves to the freedom of relegating what you do and who you are to a device, all in the name of “cool.” My other adage is that “The Devil always comes to you with candy – never Listerine.”  

President Barack Obama once said something to the effect of, “the ATM was the harbinger of bad things to come.” The friggin’ ATM! Because he knew that thousands of bank tellers and employees would be displaced, fired, and struggle to find a new career to feed their families. Today you don’t need an ATM at all. The boys who make the toys make it possible to do everything on your phone. (Hmmm? ATM = Atrophy To the Max)

In 1998, in one of my first novels (as far as I can tell), I coined the phrase TECHNOSAPIAN. The next evolutionary group of hominids. That would be us adapting to a world without banks, driving your own car, working in a factory, and everything else the technology will do for us. Then like everything else that evolution adapts to, we will become something else. Possibly amorphous, corpulent blobs. See the other movie, Wall-E. 

Okay, so now you are saying, Geez, this guy sounds like the old man yelling, “Get off my lawn!” Maybe, but my life was better. I had more time to live before technology made the work I used to travel to (and only did for 40 hours a week), a never-ending 24/7 obligation within reach of my cellphone, er… smart (?) phone. 

Okay, one last proof of concept, as they like to say in Silicon Valley. The ultimate indication of our collective future is that everything you are, all that identified you in the world, the basis of social media, was your face. (see Looker) But 3000 milliseconds ago, Facebook is now Meta. You know, as in Meta-Data. That is who you are now. Not a collection of cells, bones, muscle, and tissue, that if you are lucky, comes wrapped in a form looking like Susan Dey (the perfect female in Looker). But scanned to a series of data points by which those evil Ad Execs can now serve you up advertisements of things you don’t need with greater accuracy and less waste.

Everybody now, in mindless unison: Meta is Betta! Meta is Betta! Metta is Betta. – Candy, anyone?