Kerfuffle

The couches and chairs in the library should be comfortable. But are they too comfortable?

One of the places I like to go on the UW campus when I have a lot of reading to do is the card catalog room in Memorial Library.  Since most current undergraduates never used card catalogs in their young lives, all that thankfully being on computers now, it's not a busy place.  I'm not sure if they maintain it for posterity or because some people still use it... although I have yet to see a single card drawer be pulled in all the time I've spent there so far.

One of the nice things about the room is that it has this big open space with large west-facing windows.  Lots of natural light makes it a great reading spot.  It's quiet.  And it has the best furniture for sinking into whatever you have to read.

People tend to move the furniture around a little to catch the light, get near an electrical outlet, of otherwise meet some small need.  It's easy to do on the tile floor.  Some patrons get a little more into the space than others.  I watched one young woman drag a couch about 30 feet, then turn it around and pull it close to a facing chair.  She unpacked her various items, stretched out, read for about ten minutes, and then spent the better part of the hour taking a nap...

 

For whatever reason, I found this amusing... enough so that I had to take a few photos.  She reminded me of the sorority girls on the show Greek, right down to the extensive collection of pink items (bags, shoes, sweater, and binder).  It's not like she was keeping others from using the furniture, since the room was nearly empty.  Too much weekend must have spilled into Monday.  Maybe a little too much fun watching the Packers game the night before. 

I wonder if she knows that she snores loud enough to be heard through that poli-sci textbook.

Riding with the ghost of Rosser Reeves: I feel like I've befriended the originator of :30 presidential campaign TV ads

In hindsight, I guess it shouldn't have come as that much of a surprise that the man who gave us the first presidential campaign television commercials also gave mankind the sales pitch, "Melts in your mouth, and not in your hand."  Rosser Reeves was that man, and he was known in his day at the dean of the school of hard-sell advertising.

I came to know Mr. Reeves, who died in 1984, in an oddly personal way this spring by spending days sifting through the extensive collection of his personal papers archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society.  The treasure hunt was a requirement of a graduate school course in the history of mass communication.  One of the course requirements was to research and write a paper about an event or historical figure using primary sources... archives. 

My original subject was Bill Bernbach, one of the most important figures in the advertising business and founder of the company I worked for most of my career.  Unfortunately, Mr. Bernbach's papers reside at Columbia or somewhere back east, and grad school has no travel budget.  But in reading up on him, I came across an interview with Mr. Reeves, whose papers were to be found in Madison.  Once I found out he was the first to use the now standard :30 television spots to sell America a presidential candidate, I knew I found my subject.

I mean, c'mon, how could I pass up a chance to learn about the man who gave the world this:

Or this:

Or this:

To look at any or all of these spots is to understand what television advertising was like in the early 1950s.  As Reeves said years later, “We were all new to television in those days, and we did not know what a thing we had… what a powerful medium we were working with.”  One of the things they learned right away was to focus on a single key point, what Reeves called the unique selling proposition (USP... a term still used today).  He had noted that, "Eisenhower was a singularly inept speaker," but knew that with the right wording limited to the three most important issues of the day, he could sell Ike to the public.  (Reeves actually wanted to go with a single issue, but the Republican National Committee wanted three.  Since they were the client, they won that battle, as is often the way in the advertising business.)

He poured over campaign documents, lifting phrases and ideas and  crafting them into what were actually :20 "chain break" spots that would run between prime time programs.  Then booked the General some studio time.  Ike knocked out over 30 spots that Reeves ended up writing on the fly; he had figured the candidate could get through maybe ten but was apparently a quick study.  Only after all the "answers" were filmed did the ad agency go out and recruit people to ask the questions.  As we say in the business, they fixed it in the edit.

The result was "Eisenhower Answers America."  Note the very similar production style and values in the Ike spots compared to the packaged goods spots also done by Reeves...

I love that woman.  Add some drama, a little war footage, plus the convention money shot and you have your :60 version:

Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson felt putting himself on camera was undignified.  Perhaps he knew he'd read cue cards even less artfully than Eisenhower.  Here's what the boys over at the Stevenson campaign put together as a comeback to the Eisenhower Answers America issue-oriented ads:

All right, then.  Got it.  Now what the hell does it mean?

Ike's team easily trumped them by hiring Irving Berlin to score and Walt Disney Studios to animate:

What I found amazing was that most of what I read in the Reeves archives about the 1952 election was found in two file boxes that represented less than half of one of the dozen or so cubic feet of papers and other files available.  It took me five trips to the Wisconsin Historical Society to get what I needed, mostly because I kept getting sidetracked by stuff that was irrelevant to my research but too interesting to ignore.  My media history professor, Jim Kates, told our class this would happen, and I thought he was kidding.  He wasn't.  The more I read, the more I wanted to dig deeper.  By the end of a day of reading Reeves' letters, handwritten notes, speeches, and phone messages, I would feel like I had been hangin' out with the dude.

I turned in the paper this week as the semester came to an end.  This was a project that was both fun and satisfying to do, and in some ways, I'm sorry its over.  I'm gonna miss you, Rosser, ya big lug.  I may have to have a double martini -- up -- in his honor tonight.

It's finals week, and I'm once again a victim (yeah, victim... that's it) of my own procrastination

It's Monday.  By the end of the week, I will have completed the final exams in the two remaining classes I have to take to complete my masters degree in procrastination, I mean in mass communication.  I will also be handing in two papers which are, charitably put, works in progress at the moment.  One is just about ready to come out of the oven; the other is still mostly ingredients spread over the dining room table.  No worries.  I do my best under pressure.

One thing that will be set aside is daily posts here on Kerfuffle.  Unless something really incredible happens -- like a giant condor snatches up Dick Cheney and drops him into a volcano or something like that -- I'll be back by the weekend to begin dispatches from our trip to San Francisco.

Meanwhile, take a look at the Twitter Feed just to the left.  I'll still toss up the occasional missive and some linky goodness over there.  I can't go completely social network cold turkey!

Are college students multi-tasking, disengaging, or maybe a little of both? Texting and Facebooking seems commonplace in the classroom

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to a class of seniors at UW Madison.  The class, an elective course in the advertising program, deals with media strategy... a subject near and dear to my heart.  Giving guest lectures is good practice for me, given that I plan on teaching once I get the degrees I am chasing.

Something that one can't help but notice when teaching a class is the texting, web-surfing and emailing that seems to be going on.  I see it as a student as well, most often in classes that include undergraduates.  Now, I'm not slagging undergraduates... just pointing out that it is, in my opinion, a generational thing. 

In yesterday's lecture, I tried not to let it bug me.  Maybe I was boring.  That's certainly a likely cause for a student to seek a diversion.  But the thing that remains most surprising to me is how blatant the texting and surfing is.  I mean, c'mon.  I can see the phone in your lap and see your fingers moving! 

Admittedly, I take a little pleasure in calling students on it.  Being that I am talking about the competition for people's attention, it's easy to say something like, " A lot of times people are doing multiple things, like watching TV and texting... like you are."  Then I pause and look right at the offender.  Boy, did I get a dirty look from one student yesterday. 

I've learned from making lots of presentations in my career that it's best to work the room... walk around a lot to better engage the audience.  It's also a good way to get to see the laptops screens of students who are trying to appear to be taking notes.  Taking notes on a guest lecture?  Uh huh.  I positioned myself by one student who was Facebooking away, until she realized I was essentially reading over her shoulder.  Yeah, I was being a dick, but I was having a little fun.  Since I was doing the lecture for free, I figured I was entitled.

Funny thing, though.  As I left the campus and was thinking about this subject, I found myself recalling a class way back in my own undergraduate experience.  I've long forgotten the professor's name, but he was a nice enough guy who was teaching a physical science elective about the technology and physics particular to energy.  The class was held in one of those big lecture rooms with theater-like seating.  At the end of class one day, he wrapped it up, then said he would like to "speak with Mr. Wilcox."  Uh oh.

When I went up to see what the professor wanted, I figured it must be something about a quiz or paper or whatever.  I was wrong.  "I would like to know why you were reading a newspaper during my class," he said plainly.  Shit.  I gave him a brutally honest yet highly inappropriate response:  "I was bored."  I still remember the look on his face when he simply replied, "Oh.  O.K."

I immediately felt like a total asshole, and that's because that's exactly how I acted.  I was  blatantly reading the newspaper, in plain sight, during his lecture.  That's every bit as bad as blatantly texting or web-surfing in class. 

As I thought about this, the thing I realized was that I was no better then than some students are now.  In some ways I was worse, since I more or less offended the professor to his face... something I have never forgotten.  I hope that professor has, but I was still an ass that day.

Technology is so commonplace now that I guess this is just the way of the world.  I've watched clients tap away at their Blackberries while we were presenting work to them, and I've seen people casually answer their phones and leave a meeting with no apparent guilt, regret or apology.  And, myself, I have an app on my iPhone that deliver's a bogus call complete with convincing screen graphics... just in case I need to bail.  Rude?  Yes.  Of occasional helpful utility?  You bet.

I have become what I have ridiculed... again.

So, college boy, how are those research papers coming along?

One skill I developed years ago as an undergraduate, as I have noted here before, is the art of procrastination.  I totally mastered it in my years in the ad agency business.  Why do now what you can do in a panic later on?

It's finals time in graduate school.  Three research papers and a final that is mostly about research statistics.  Much fun!  Many in my cohort of fellow grad students have been n constant contact with one another, offering help, suggestions, proofing and crying towels.  My friend Joe, an accomplished television news reporter that is, like me, an "old" guy, sent me this late last night in response to my inquiry about his Research Methods class final project/paper...

My paper reminds me of an exchange between Donald Sutherland (Professor Jennings) and Pinto (Thomas Hulce) in National Lampoon's Animal House while referring to the professor's novel:

Pinto: "How long you been working on it?"
Jennings: "Seven years."
Pinto: It must be very good."
Jennings: "It's a piece of shit."

Yep. 

Recounts: a different take on the low-interest voter

Most balloting seems pretty straight-forward.  The voter is asked to blacken a circle or draw a line through a box with a special felt tip pen.  Maybe it's a butterfly ballot, and the voter is to use a stylus to punch a hole through the ballot to mark various choices.  Levers.  Touch screens.  All in all, this shouldn't be brain surgery.  And yet, as ballots continue to be counted in the Coleman versus Franken senatorial race in Minnesota, the electorate is once again proving that if given instructions, a certain number of people will ignore them.  The photo at left (click for larger image) shows how some knucklehead put a check mark in the oval he or she was supposed to color in (like the visible instructions show).  The scanner doesn't recognize -- and thus doesn't count -- improperly marked ballots.  This should have counted for McCain-Palin, and ultimately did after a hand count I presume.

I spent a good chunk of time this weekend coding surveys I fielded for a graduate school research project.  The instructions, which were read aloud in each undergraduate class that was part of the survey, were pretty damn simple.  For nearly all the questions, a Likert scale was used.  You've seen these before...

In this section, there are a series of statements with which you may (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neither disagree nor agree, (4) agree, or (5) strongly agree.  Please respond to each of these items by indicating your level of disagreement or agreement by circling the appropriate number.  There is no right or wrong answer.

The scale is played out thusly...

disagree    1    2    3    4    5      agree

Apparently, this was still pretty confusing to some of the college students who responded.  Several respondents just circled either disagree or agree.  (I coded those as either a 1 or 5.  I hope that's cool, Dr. B.)  Others were indecisive, and circles a pair of numbers, trying to split between a 2 and a 3 for example.  I coded that based on which ever number seemed more emphasized.  Judgment call.)  Another section asked multiple choice questions, some of which were returned with multiple answers.

Don't get me wrong; I am not looking to make fun of my respondents.  They were all doing me a favor by helping me with this survey.  Rather, I guess this got me to realize that people just don't always follow instructions, even when they are read aloud or clearly written with diagrams and pictures and readily available assistance.  It's just the way it goes.  What should be easy, and appears easy to most of us, isn't so simple.  People fuck things up... even smart people.  Seeing this in my own survey gives me a new appreciation for the occasional need for a painstakingly accurate recount in close elections.

All of that said, I do have to wonder if the people who recount ballots ever see rationalization for the way a voter voted.  This occurs to me because on several of the surveys I reviewed for my project, there were little notes in the margins explaining why certain answers were chosen.  My survey dealt with computer self-efficacy, and how people used social networks and music download sites and stuff like that.  I came across comments like "I hate iTunes," "only an idiot would buy a CD," and "I used to download music until my I dropped my laptop."  And what's with little smiley faces next to some answers?

Are the ballot police in Minnesota finding stuff like "Coleman is a shithead" or "I hate Stuart Smalley"?  I have to wonder. 

[cross-posted on Daily Kos]

Shroomin' to a better you!

Looking back from the perspective of a person in his late 40s, I truly am glad I went to college when I did.  True, we didn't have personal computers, cell phones or iPods.  But we did have lower drinking ages, plentiful but lower-wattage weed, and a nice variety of accessible recreational drugs.   Indeed, all of those things (except maybe the mellower weed) were bad.  Bad, bad, bad.  And I in no way condone under-aged drinking or the use of illegal drugs among college students and other young people today.  Doing such things is wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

That is so easy to say now that I am well past that stage in my life.  With the exception of an infrequent toke (which invariably now makes me cough), I stick to beer and the occasional scotch or martini.  But back in the day, as we old timers like to say, I was pretty willing to try various kinds of illicit substances as long as they weren't injected.  I tried various hallucinogens, and as far as I know, haven't had any acid flashbacks... which in a way is kind of disappointing.  But the best of the psychedelic drugs in my book were the magic mushrooms.

One of my fraternity brothers grew his own, and boy was that fun.  Over the next several years, I had maybe four or five other opportunities to go shroomin', and each time was a blast.  One memorable experience involved getting into a friendly snowball fight with some Chicago cops outside the Burwood Tap in Lincoln Park.  I imagine they attributed our excessive giggling to alcohol, and they were partly right.  Another time I was with friends in the Arizona high country,and everything just seemed really beautiful.  So beautiful that I took three rolls of pictures.  Back in those days, we used this stuff called "film" and it came in rolls you had to take to Walgreens to get "developed."  When I got my pictures back, I had about 75 shots of trees.  Lots of trees, all looking very tree-like.  Clearly, there was something in the mushrooms that didn't translate to film. 

I was given cause to revisit these memories when another fraternity brother sent this article along, with the e-mail title of "Raise your hand if you were a participant."  I wish...

Study finds long benefit in illegal mushroom drug

NEW YORK - In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project.

She felt like she was taking off. She saw colors. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open.

But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day.

"I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing," said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."

Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had.  (Emphasis mine.) 

Well, shit, I could have told them that.  How come I never get picked for studies like this?

(Hat tip to PT for the link!)

The office intern: talent to be develped or slave to be abused?

Every academic adviser tells students the same thing:  go out and get an internship.  It will look great on your resume."  And to a degree, the advisers are correct.  Potential employers appreciate candidates who have some kind of relevant real-world experience.  These days, in a tough economy, anything that gives one an advantage over one's competition is a good thing.

Over the past twenty years or so, I've hired and worked with a lot of interns.  At both of my ad agency employers, I have been given responsibility for the intern programs after bitching about how they were run.  (Yet another "be careful what you wish for" experience.)  In both cases, though, I am glad I had the chance to step in.  I was responsible for converting the programs from offering non-paid to paid positions.  At DDB I broke us free from that annoying "preferred school" mandate that mostly rewarded senior management's alma maters and clients' progeny.  For LSB, I was successful in shifting from a semester-long to a 12-month-long program, making the several months of training valuable to the agency.  Far from a thankless responsibilty, I am glad I had the chance to work with so many talented college students.  I still keep in touch with several of them, and many have gone on to do great things both professionally and personally.

I got to thinking about what it means to be an intern today after a telephone conversation with my nephew Jake this morning.  He is currently interning for a production company in New York City.  Before last week, he had never even been to New York, and now he's working down in SoHo.  How cool is that?  Well, the New York part is ultra cool.  The job itself, not so much.  Turns out, as he told me, the "company" is one guy, who seems to be in the downside of his film career.  He's a jerk, and he treats his six unpaid interns pretty badly.  In order for them to have the privelege of working for his fine company, they are required to essentailly sign away any rights to the work product they create.  Mr. Jerk tosses out "concepts" and his interns try to write them into treatments... which he will then own.  Hmmm.  Fair?  Hard to say. 

My advice to Jake was to sign the agreement, but to hold back his best ideas for himself.  Sure, that will mean that he won't be developing his best ideas in his internship.  Fine.  He can do that on his own time.  The real experience he's going to walk away with is something some of us don't get until we're in the real world.  He will learn how to work for an asshole.  That in itself is actually pretty valuable.  The world is full of assholes, and eventually every one us gets our turn working for one.  Some of us get several turns.  And in Jake's chosen field of film making, he will find that working for the non-asshole just may be the novelty.  (A year working in and mostly around the motion picture marketing business out in LA taught me that in spades.)  So, Jake,  work for the jerk, learn how NOT to be a boss, and develop a little tougher skin.

As I walk away from the ad agency business, I know I will miss hiring and mentoring interns.  I think my approach has been a good one.  I usually would give interns more backstory on goings on than I gave to some of my own staff.  I wanted them to learn exactly what was going on behind the scenes so that they could better understand the seemingly illogical events they would experience in the working world.  Maybe at times I told them too much, or showed a little too much cynicism (me? cynical?), but I always did so because I thought it would ultimately be helpful.  I guess that's one reason I want to go into teaching.  I can make a full time job out of helping develop young talent and then sitting back and watching them become as successful or more so than I have been.

Some may think this is kind of egotistical and self-serving.  Yeah, maybe.  But one thing that really motivates me to help kids along in their career endeavors is that there were people who did that for me.  Mike White, David Drake, Dan Rank, Gary Mueller, Steve Felt, Chris Schuba, Phil Reynolds, Cathy Hurless, Ken Kaess, Pat Dermody, Larry Simon... too many to name.*  Some of them were actual bosses.  Others were good professional friends who gave great counsel.  All of them helped make me successful and happy in my chosen field.  So when I think about standouts like Margaret Graff, Robert Millican, David Skinner, Amy Eckert, Mike Koweiski and all the other interns I have worked with and who have gone on to great things, I just think that helping them was my way of paying it forward, as the movie title suggests. 

And now if Ross, the most recent intern to graduate (pictured in the middle), can just land a job, then my LSB streak will remain unbroken.  Did you call those people like I told you, Ross?  OK, who out there has a job for f***ing Ross?  C'mon.  He's a good guy.  Even if he is a (gasp!) Republican.

I know.  I'm a sap.

* I would so love to name some of the more preeminent jerks and assholes I have worked for and worked with.  But I think I'll take the high road and just use initials.  For those who know me well, see if you can guess who they are!  DP, JC, RG, CB, KB, and the raging bitch, RB (a client who I was so happy to see get fired after she called me a "fucking moron" in front of my new boss).

A 4.0? Me? Who'd a thunk it?

I wasn't prepared to believe it until I saw the official numbers.  But, yes, doubters and skeptics,I did manage to get As in both of my grad school classes.  That's a 4.0. grade point average, don't ya know.  That's never happened for me ever.  

Granted, it's only for two classes.  Nonetheless, I'm celebrating.  I can accommodate almost any excuse to toss back a few beers, and making the graduate school Dean's List at UWW works for me.  Plus this goes a long way toward maintaining Tom's confidence that leaving my job to go to school full time was a good idea.

How much is too much time in the library?

I logged 37 hours over three days.

As has been noted here in other posts, I have not lost my life-long affinity for procrastination. Developed as a child and mastered in college, I took this skill through countless new business presentations and major projects in my 28 years in the ad agency business. Whether or not it is true that I do my best work under pressure of deadline doesn't matter, since we'll never know. It's the only way I do anything.

Also noted, in the previous post, is that I sort of skipped over the introductory class to my grad school program since I started halfway into an academic year. So what happens when procrastination and not knowing what you are doing come together when I have to crank out two 25+ page research papers? Among other things, a whole lot of time in the university's library.

For the most part, I pretty much tried to stick to the reason i was there... to get these fucking papers written. But, when you spend three straight days -- and literally the entire time from open to close two of those days -- in the library, you tend to come away with a grab bag of observations. And, thanks to digital technology, you can come away with pictures too.

They have special hours during finals week. I needed this sign to tell me when they would open. When they flashed the lights and yelled over the PA they were closing, I knew they were closing.

It became apparent that people have their favorite spots, and become kind of territorial. That's helpful if you want someone to keep an eye on your stuff while you go to the bathroom and then get your ninth Diet Pepsi. I was able to get "my table" every time. This guy and I were on the same schedule since he was in this same spot all three days I was in my spot. i wonder if I'm on his blog.

Smart people bring food with them. I did that on Saturday. Stopped by a Jimmy Johns and bought a couple sammies. But did I do that for the 17 hour marathon Sunday. Of course not. Instead, I met my nutritional needs here.

And pity the poor clown who got someone to watch is stuff so he could get a vendo-latte, only to have this happen. Doh!

Good thing the library staff puts out free coffee. It ain't Starbucks but judging from how often they were refilling this thing it must have done the job.

If I haven't said it enough, I am really happy with my MacBook. I am just plain happy to have my own computer. Otherwise, you're spending a lot of time here, like my classmate Joan. Get a laptop Joan. Trust me, it's a better investment than those tires your car needs. Well, maybe not.

I'm not the best typist. My method is a sort of hybrid between what they used to call "touch-typing" (when you can do it without looking) and hunt and peck. This guy, well, he seemed to be able to type one-handedly, since his left hand never seemed to move from this spot.

I only wish I had a picture of the guy I saw drinking a beer. He was ever so discreet about pouring it into a cup, but it did not go unnoticed. It would have been nice of him to share, but I guess bringing in a cooler wasn't practical.