We’re governed by people who lack the virtue of humility and the capacity to feel shame.

What brought it home for a lot of us was the Obama campaign commercial giving him all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden as if he’d rappelled into the Abbottabad compound from a chopper – machine gun blazing and a Bowie knife clenched in his teeth.

That, plus the world’s longest Ickey Shuffle, a 27,000 mile ain’t-I-great trip to and from Afghanistan.

We should have seen it when he took office. “Now the oceans will stop rising,” as if he was planning to upstage King Canute.

Shameless and without humility with a double helping of self-righteous sanctimony is as good a definition of a**hole as any.

But I suspect that our President has gone beyond a**hole all the way to malignant narcissist (MN). At least a dozen of these “Twenty Traits of Malignant Narcissism” fit him to a T: Twenty Traits

By himself, he wouldn’t even be a footnote. But he’s not by himself.

He’s surrounded by enabling a**holes and MNs: his wife, his preacher, his advisors, his mad bomber dinner companions, his czars, his cabinet, the vice-president, most of the senate, a lot of the house, useful idiots in the media, preening Hollywood know nothings, ivory tower cretins in academia, union thugs, big biz cronies and Armani-clad beggars with their hands out. And that’s just at the Federal level.

Trickling down, we find three of our formerly great states – California, Illinois and New York – completely in thrall to a**holes and MNs and states like Michigan, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland, and Rhode Island not far behind.

Cities, too, led by the moribund Detroit, the nanny-city of New York, the egregious Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and even little Stockton, poster child for civic kleptomania.

Huge chunks of the country are now under the heavy thumbs of micro-regulating, energy-destroying, wealth-job-family-destroying, Constitution-ignoring, a**holes. Their hallmarks are incompetence, corruption, lies, cronyism, ad hominem nastiness, race and class warfare, and polarization.

It’s not that they’re dumb. They’re bright and educated. They know their “ideas” can’t work, have never worked and will never work. They know what will work but they can’t allow it because the real world doesn’t need people like them. And they just can’t stand it. So they’ll enjoy themselves while they destroy everything worthwhile. That’s what malignant narcissistic a**holes do.

Who votes for these people?

A**holes, of course.

1958. McDonald’s mastermind, Ray Kroc, had never envisioned a fish sandwich on the menu but one of his early franchisees, Lou Groen of Cincinnati, thought it might work. He explained to Kroc that he was losing business during Lent because 90% of his neighborhood was Catholic and the fish sandwich would be perfect.

Kroc thought he had a better idea, a Hula Burger with a pineapple slice instead of a meat patty. Groen convinced Kroc to test both at the same time. Filet-o-Fish won hands down and is still on the menu 54 years later.

Info, via NY Post, 5/6/2012, in a review of “How the Hot Dog Found its Bun” by Josh Chetwynd (Lyons Press).

That’s the kind of thing that made McDonald’s a great company.

A franchisee got to talk to the head honcho, disagree with him and propose a sensible solution. The honcho went along with it and lost gracefully with no hard feelings.

There were no focus groups, no analyzing the life out of the ideas. Just a simple test: what do customers like better, this sandwich or that sandwich? Total cost to figure out whether to go with the fish or pineapple? Insignificant.

The government should do this kind of thing.

The Republic’s not going to be hurt if McDonald’s doesn’t get its menu right. But it is going to be seriously damaged if we don’t get Obamacare right, or Dodd-Frank, or the Law of the Sea Treaty or alternative energy, or the idiot Buffet rule. But we don’t test any of those things. Hell, our elected reps don’t even read most of them.

The least they could do is build in an exit strategy for when their pineapple slice legislation blows up in the faces.

But they can’t do that. They are incapable of even contemplating that they might be wrong. They’re not the kind of people who should be making our laws. People like Ray Kroc and Lou Groen are.

Occasionally you wind up with an amateur client. It hasn’t happened to me in years but it does happen. Oddly enough, it’s not always a bad thing.

The most common manifestation of amateurishness is probably this reaction to creative (or to anything, really): “I don’t like it,” followed by silence.

Experienced clients will say “I don’t like it” every now and then but they’ll always explain why they don’t like it.

What’s the difference here?

Experienced clients usually have solid, objective reasons: it’s off target, doesn’t hit the hot buttons, mentions features without expanding to advantages and benefits, doesn’t ask for the order … whatever. And you can handle those kinds of things.

You can’t use reasoned arguments to handle “I don’t like it,” followed by silence. I’ve tried.

No point asking “Why don’t you like it?” because if there was a reason the client would have mentioned it.

When I was younger and much dopier, I once tried this: “So what? You’re not in the target audience. You have nothing in common with the target audience. They’re females 35-55 years old, high school grads, married with kids at home and an HHI of $40,000. You’re a guy, 28 years old, MBA, single, no kids and you make over a hundred grand. I’d be amazed if you liked it.”

That didn’t go well.

There’s really only one thing you can do. Lick your wounds and change your approach.

I found an approach that can work very well.

It starts with getting the client to sign off on all the preliminary work, mostly research and creative brief. The next step is to involve the client directly in the development of the creative.

You come prepared with, say, three concepts with scribble layouts or story boards. It works best if you do the scribbling – thumbnail sketches are best – right in the meeting while you explain.

You get a reaction, scribble some more, get another reaction. Working with the client, figure out what goes where and what gets stressed. Compliment the client with something like “Hey, you should be in the creative department!”

As soon as you can, right after your meeting, write notes about what the client said.

Now, when you go back to the client with finished layouts/storyboards and copy/script, the whole thing is presold. This works, and it’s actually easier than doing it in a vacuum.

We do. Here it is on behalf of a great many Americans: We’re sorry.

We thought he was just a two bit punk with a remarkable gift of oratory.

It seemed obvious: commie dad, hippie mom, Chicago community organizer, history of shady deals (including wife’s $350,000/yr. non-job), hanging out with obscure mad bombers, 20 years of Sundays listening to a rabid lunatic, never had a job, never created anything. All he did was talk.

So we made a mistake. He’s not a two-bit punk. He’s much more than that. In just three and half years in the oval office, he has managed to:

• Polarize the country with a brilliant reverse-Alinksy strategy. Instead of isolating the enemy, it isolates single-issue groups with grievances which he then gathers into his arms and coddles. Oh, he still does the straight-Alinsky thing, too, but now it’s part of a double whammy;
• Build on the lunacy of his most destructively dirigiste predecessors: Wilson, FDR and LBJ;
• Destroy our relationships with long-standing allies;
• Appoint dozens of czars and balloon the bureaucracy in order to regulate us to near standstill;
• Ignore the Constitution so now he, his czars and his vast armies of regulators rule us by whim;
• Get us into crushing, ruinous debt with nothing to show for it;
• Begin stripping our most abundant and efficient sources of energy while fiddling amateurishly but at great cost with idiotically inefficient sources;
• Form an axis-of-evil alliance between government and bigBIG business;
• Focus on government control of health care which effectively gives government control of everything we do;
• Appoint two supremely unqualified lock-step justices to the Supreme Court – and then mock the Court;
• Fight all efforts to control the human flow across our borders;
• Allow horrifying critters like Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius and Cass Sunstein to serve as unfettered dictators.

In just three and a half years he has brought the great United States of America to its knees. All that remains is that last little push to tip us into the abyss and we’re done. America will die broke and helpless.

This is not the work of a two-bit punk. This is the work of a genius. This is a man whose monument will be the destruction of the greatest free country in history.

So we are sorry, very, very sorry. We underestimated him.

I was at a poetry reading last night (stop laughing!)

My interest in modern poetry faded about two seconds after I graduated from college but I listened attentively and enjoyed the whole thing. The guy’s very good.

Someone asked “How long does it take you to write a poem?”

“Oh,” said the poet, “sometimes months. Every poem goes through at least a hundred drafts, even the short ones (pause) especially the short ones.”

Wow, thought I, the philistine copywriter.

This man writes poems very few people will ever read or hear. They may be important poems but there’s nothing at stake that will make a practical difference in a great many lives.

On the other hand, what we write – copy for ads, commercials, web sites, emails, direct mail – is important because there’s a lot at stake – sometimes millions of dollars and lots of jobs.

And how many drafts do we go through? Not enough.

If I have time, I’ll write a dozen or so teaser headlines for envelopes and something like 20 drafts of a direct mail letter. Same with an email, especially Subject Lines. But who has time anymore?

The poet doesn’t have a deadline and he doesn’t submit his work to committees for their approval. He writes for himself and he puts his name on the finished product. It’s his and his alone. That makes a big difference. I don’t see how we can bring that factor into copywriting.

But we could at least tell the committees “Look, I wrote 20 drafts of this piece, read it to a half dozen people who know a lot about copy that sells, and made more changes. Please at least read it all the way through, the way our prospects will, without a pencil in your hand.”

P.S. The poet’s name is Michael Cleary: michaelcleary.com

Too many client “communications” whizzes and general advertising/PR agency people disdain direct marketing. They’re polite but get a few drinks in them and you’ll learn that they just hate our guts.

I’ve run into it a lot and it no longer scares me but it still puzzles me. Direct marketing can’t fail on a major scale because we plan carefully, test small and roll out gradually. Plus DM allows precision tracking and generates better and better results every time out. So whence the scorn?

It took a while, but the lights gradually went on. They hate us for at least seven very good reasons.

1. In advertising agencies, the direct marketing “departments” can wind up with a huge chunk of the advertising guys’ budgets if the clients actually care about sales.
2. Direct marketing is difficult. It takes a lot more detailed planning than the other disciplines.
3. There’s almost no room for opinions because direct marketing allows for objective answers.
4. Direct marketing can get results so exact that you can learn how well it’s doing to within a nickel. In other words, DM is accountable and that scares the pants off some people.
5. Direct marketing is not cool. There’s no room for funky, edgy, creative for creative’s-sake.
6. Its focus is on the prospect/customer not on the company.
7. If there’s a serious disagreement on approach, you can test inexpensively.

All seven of these attributes are deeply offensive to ambitious and talented wannabe cutting-edge mavericks. They’re albatrosses around the necks of avant garde creative critters.

Believe it or not, making money, acquiring and keeping customers, and building solid customer relationships can be annoying secondary considerations. It’s more important to stroke egos, be ultra cool, and, occasionally, jet off to New Zealand for a location shoot.

John Wannamaker, 19th Century department store mogul, is reported to have said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Direct marketers could have told him: “We might, maybe, waste a small percentage of your budget at the start. After that, it’s all good.”

I might.

I kind of like this spot, DollarShaveClub.com even with its “Our Prices are F***ing Great” line.

It’s a 90 second direct response commercial (Internet only by the looks of it) for DollarShaveClub.com.

It’s drawn over 4,000,000 views so far and @dollarshaveclub has about 14,000 Twitter followers.

The actual “dollar” shave looks like a loss leader. You get a free handle and two blades for a buck and pay s&h. But there are two upsells:
• $6 a month for a better handle and four better blades with no s&h OR
• $9 for a super handle and six blades – “like a personal assistant for your face.”

The prices seem to be right.

Gillette’s Fusion ProGlide seems to be about four bucks a blade and you have to buy a handle.

Assuming that DollarShaveClub.com’s $9 for 6 blades deal gives you an equally good shave, it’s less, a lot less, than half the price of Gillette.

The club’s web design is simple and kind of cool. The copy is terrific, all attitude, even in the Guarantee: “You’re going to love your blades. But even if you don’t, you can cancel anytime. Easily. We’re not Columbia House Records.”
The tag line reads “Shave Time. Shave Money.”
Nice work.
Because I’m not fond of being on the receiving end of continuity ship-till-forbid programs, I’ll check out prices for ProGlide when I visit Costco later this week. My guess is that I’ll give DollarShaveClub.com a shot. I’ll let you know.

I know. Jack Nicholson said “You can’t handle the truth,” but we’re adapting today.

I ask a lot of questions in the course of a normal confusing business day, and quite often I get a lot of hemming and hawing in response. That leads me to try to explain an apparently difficult-to-understand concept: “I need the answer and I don’t care if it isn’t the answer you think I want to hear.” That seems clear enough but, for some reason, it almost never is. Here are few typical questions:

• Who wrote this?
• What’s the budget?
• What made you choose this medium?
• Is there an objective in this plan?
• How long do these meetings usually last?
• Someone leaped straight from objective to tactics, was there a strategy in here at one time?
• When is this due?
• Why do you want me to delete X?

You probably ask questions like this a thousand times a year and you probably get real answers as rarely as I do.

Often there are no answers, in which case you should be able to ignore the issue that made you ask the question by, say, not deleting X. But that’ll inevitably force you to ask another question. “Why can’t I ignore it?” And there’ll be no answer.

Just as often, the real answer to a question is “I don’t know.” I wish people would just say that. I do all the time because, in addition to asking a lot of questions, I get asked a lot of questions. And usually I say “I don’t know.” Unless I do know.

There are probably only five acceptable answers to any question: 1) I can’t tell you 2) none of your business 3) I don’t know 4) I don’t know but I’ll find out, which should lead, eventually, to … 5) whatever the answer really is.

I guess a lot of people find it hard to believe that you don’t care what the answer is, even though you need to know it to do your job.

There’s a word that describes not caring what the answer is but needing it. It’s “disinterested”. People think it means “not interested”. It doesn’t. A baseball fan might not care who wins a game but, as a fan, he’s interested in the game itself. He’s disinterested but interested enough to show up and watch. An umpire doesn’t care if a runner is safe or out. He’s disinterested but interested because his job is to make the call.

Office Depot finally realized they had a gigantic problem. Customers could get into their stores easily enough but they couldn’t buy anything without running the gauntlet of a hideous lineup.

The grand poobahs of Office Depot must have commissioned some basic retail research. I imagine the Chairman skimmed the report, slammed the conference table and roared: “Holy Cats! We’re as bad as Pet Smart, maybe as bad as the DMV, or even Friendly’s. We’re wasting people’s time. Quick, let’s run a series of commercials about how fast we are.”

They hired Tony Stewart, a race car driver. Maybe the research told the OD honchos that their customers are NASCAR fans. Anyway, Tony’s super-fast and we’re supposed to make the connection.

Then they took the Hammer Time phrase from old school rapper MC Hammer and converted it to Depot Time, linking Depot and Time. Cool.

Let’s hope the whizzes grasp the difference between telling people they’re fast and, well, actually being fast. We’ll see.

And they might want to work on that tag line. Whenever we hear Depot Time, don’t a lot of us think of Home Depot?