Secret weapon for marketers

One advantage of starting a new job is that you get exposed to new points of view. I’ve enjoyed sharing ideas with the new marketing director, who started the same day I did. Last week he lent me The Creative Companion by David Fowler.

Printed in 2003 by Ogilvy & Mather as a small red spiral notebook (I’m not sure you could say that it was published) it was apparently intended for in-house use, as a kind of secret weapon for marketers. It contains a one-page foreword, a two-page afterword, and 30 miniature essays. Many of these are pure gold. Two of them appear below.

The Same Old Story, But New.

Advertising, like literature and cinema, operates on a mere handful of story lines, retold in hundreds of new ways. Which one will you use? Well, how about “conflict”? A problem occurs, your product solves it.

Aren’t the classic Volkswagen ads really about “the underdog”? What about “using product changes world”? “Cute town where the thing is made”? “Using product changes person’s life”? “Founder as goofball/regular guy/earnest guy”? “Factory tour”? “Quirky roots of product”? “Employees”? “Title cards”? “"Talking heads”?

Instead of just writing ads, stop and think about the story you want to tell. Consider how others have told it before you. Then tell it once more, new.

Don’t Create, Uncover.

Stop trying to create a brand. Instead, simply reveal an appropriate portion of the brand. The brand already exists. It’s already at work in the minds and hearts of people. Maybe they’re just overlooked an aspect of it.

Unless it’s a new product, don’t go off and create anything. Just illuminate a corner of the brand that has been in the dark. Then your message will feel appropriate, like it comes from the brand.

Unless you know somebody at Ogilvy, I’m not sure how you can get hold of this book. There’s a copy in Katoomba, Australia, you could get for $37.40 plus $19.95 shipping. (It may be worth it.) Otherwise you could be out of luck.

My New York museum exhibit wish list

Some months ago, Ephemeral New York suggested that it would be a good idea for a New York museum to put on an exhibit of etchings by Martin Lewis.

I agree. I can picture a Martin Lewis exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, and there are a few other ideas for New York-based exhibits that I think would be worth a try.

• Islands of New York, for a look at Governors Island, Rikers Island, City Island, Roosevelt Island, Ellis Island, Randall’s Island, and other small and sometimes overlooked islands of the city
• New York wastelands, featuring the photography of Nathan Kensinger
• Thoreau’s New York, including Thoreau’s uneasy meeting with Walt Whitman, and a glimpse of Staten Island as it was in 1843, when he arrived to tutor the sons of William Emerson.
• Joseph Mitchell’s New York, with excerpts from his essays and photographs of McSorley’s, the Old Hotel, Joe Gould, and the oystermen’s community on Staten Island
• Wildlife of New York, highlighting the variety of birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians, and insects found in the city, with emphasis on major parks and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge

Alexandra Fuller picks her top 10 African memoirs

African fiction gets a fair amount of attention from reviewers and anthologists, but the continent has produced some extraordinary memoirs too. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is one of these, and in the Guardian she lists ten of her own favorites.

It’s a good list, and I second her choices of One Day I Will Write About This Place, This Child Will Be Great, What Is the What, and The Devil That Danced on the Water. I have not read Mandela’s Conversations with Myself, but his Long Walk to Freedom would make my own personal list. I’ve read other works by Zakes Mda and Albie Sachs, and look forward to reading the memoirs she mentions.

Putting together my top ten list would be tough, but here are a few of my favorite memoirs from Africa:

Algerian White by Assia Djebar
Out of Egypt by André Aciman
The Dark Child by Camara Laye
Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
Notes from the Hyena’s Belly by Nega Mezlekia
Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan

An interview with Dany Laferrière

I don’t often interview someone, but last Friday I was given the opportunity to see the Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière discuss Hurricane Katrina and Hollywood disaster movies at a panel discussion at NYU, and to talk with him afterwards.

By the time the event ended, around ten o’clock, Laferrière was hungry for dinner but willing for the moment to have some coffee. We walked to Au Bon Pain, only to be thrown out (they were about to close). We went next to a pizza parlor, where they had no coffee and we settled for bottled water.

With the help of our gracious interpreter, Isabelle Dupuis, the interview somehow came out all right.

The November issue of Words Without Borders, dedicated to Writing from the Caribbean, also features an excerpt from Laferrière’s latest book The World Is Moving Around Me, about his experience during the Haitian earthquake of 2010. The single paragraph called “A Man in Mourning” is a heartbreaking story in itself. 

Thoreau on ospreys

In his book Return of the Osprey, David Gessner explains that ospreys are the only raptors that will dive entirely underwater to catch their prey—though he found it hard to catch them in the act. The ospreys’ grip is aided by their oversized talons and toes that are cleated like golf shoes.

The toes are scaly, the bottoms of the toes studded with projections called spicules. The spicules barb down into the fish, and the grip is sure and spiky. Moreover, an osprey’s legs are exceedingly long, so that they can stretch down into the water with what Pete Dunne calls a “boardinghouse reach.” The legs also act as shock absorbers, muting the impact upon hitting the water.

Return of the Osprey prompted me to look some of the passages in Thoreau’s Journal where he describes the bird he called the “fish hawk.” Thoreau doesn’t seem to have observed a dive himself, though he does see an osprey attempting to skim a fish from the surface of the Concord River.

Dec. 30, 1851
When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.

April 15, 1855
The Great Meadows are covered, except a small island in their midst, but not a duck do we see there. On a low limb of a maple on the edge of the river, thirty rods from the present shore, we saw a fish hawk eating a fish. Sixty rods off we could see his white crest. We landed, and got nearer by stealing through the woods. His legs looked long as he stood up on the limb with his back to us, and his body looked black against the sky and by contrast with the white of his head. There was a dark stripe on the side of the head. He had got the fish under his feet on the limb, and would bow his head, snatch a mouthful, and then look hastily over his right shoulder in our direction, then snatch another mouthful and look over his left shoulder. At length he launched off and flapped heavily away. We found at the bottom of the water beneath where he sat numerous fragments of the fish he had been eating, parts of the fins, entrails, gills, etc., and some was dropped on the bough. From one fin which I examined, I judged that it was either a sucker or a pout. There were small leaches adhering to it.

May 12, 1855
From beyond the orchard saw a large bird far over the Cliff Hill, which, with my glass, I soon made out to be a fish hawk advancing. Even at that distance, half a mile off, I distinguished its gull-like body, — pirate-like fishing body fit to dive, — and that its wings did not curve upward at the ends like a hen-hawk’s (at least I could not see that they did), but rather down. It came on steadily, bent on fishing, with long and heavy undulating wings, with an easy, sauntering flight, over the river to the pond, and hovering over Pleasant Meadow at long time, hovering from time to time in one spot, when more than a hundred feet high, then making a very short circle or two and hovering again, then sauntering off against the woodside. At length he reappeared, passed downward over the shrub oak plain and alighted on an oak (of course now bare), standing this time apparently lengthwise on the limb. Soon took to wing again and went to fishing down the stream a hundred feet high. When just below Bittern Cliff, I observed by its motions that it observed something. It made a broad circle of observation in its course, lowering itself somewhat; then, by one or two steep sidewise flights, it reached the water, and, as near as intervening trees would let me see, skimmed over it and endeavored to clutch its prey in passing. It failed the first time, but probably succeeded the second. Then it leisurely winged its way to a tall bare tree on the east side of the Cliffs, and there we left it apparently pluming itself. It had a very white belly, and indeed appeared all white beneath its body. I saw broad black lines between the white crown and throat.

Photo by Mark Courtney/AP.