kiss my black ads: Harry Webber

Every morning I wake up to create something magnificent. Every night I go to sleep to realize that magnificence in my dreams. Magnificent. Not cool. Not slick. Cool and slick are easy. Magnificent is really, really elusive. Magnificent takes you on a journey through deserts of despair and desolation. It takes you past the rotting corpses of borrowed interest and shock and awe. If you were a Knight Templar, magnificent would be your search for the shadow that was Saladin. Sought but seldom found.

To create great advertising; advertising that withstands the test of time and engages the intelligence of steel workers and hedge fund millionaires; this is not for the weak of heart. To create magnificent advertising is to seek the impossible, yet know it can be realized. Every morning I embrace the insanity that such a journey entails. I inhale its scent, for I know it awaits the chase.

To create magnificent advertising is to seek the impossible, yet know it can be realized. Every morning I embrace the insanity that such a journey entails.

I am not a black man. I am an advertising man. This is my life’s work. I do not care that you will not hire me. You are not my problem. The next magnificent idea is my problem. I ride through the bowels of my city, listening to the subway voices for clues to the next moment of language that will point me to a point of understanding not found in client briefs or analytic myopia. Rap lyrics, not account planners inform me of the visions of the prophets. The scent grows stronger in the grocery isles when I spy shelf facings below eye level where missing products identify hidden trends.

Magnificence is not an easy prey. I am not in casual pursuit. The hunt gives me life. My clients are not the brand managers and CMOs. They grew up with my work but the agencies have wiped me from their awareness. I am the look of the Motown Sound and the longest running advertising and public service campaigns in history. It matters not. The past is irrelevant to me. Magnificence lives in the future.

I mourn the passing of craft from our profession. I feel empty when technologists worship at the alters of the next new irrelevance. But I am not distracted. My day begins at dawn and ends at exhaustion. My sword is Photoshop and my shield is html. My path is uncharted and in my wake are the trophies of my victories. The brands I have elevated to art, before once again returning to the hunt. It does not concern me that you do not see fit to hire me.

Last week a young boy turned in his gun after he read the words of http://FederalPrisoner6094709.com. Winning the One Show cannot compare with saving a life? I take time from my passion to speak to those of you like the great Jim Glover, Derek Walker, Hadji Williams and other senior black creatives. They seek their blacks in the high schools. People like us are of no interest to them. Do not despair. Seek your own magnificence.

This gem of sagacity is taken from Mr Harry Webber's response to a post at Ad Age. Mr Webber is an Ad Man's Ad Man. This stuff just drips from the man's being. He should be running three agencies, no, conglomerates... simultaneously.

~Craig

https://sites.google.com/site/mayuradocs/PinIt.png

The Gatorade "G" campaign, which I liked, hasn't helped sales. I thought it was artistically sound and would make for a great premise of an ad campaign. However the brand sales have slumped. "Gatorade maintains that "What is G?" is right on track, despite plummeting sales, consumer confusion and reports that creative is back on the drawing board."
PepsiCo restaged its iconic Gatorade brand earlier this year. According to Beverage Digest, Gatorade's volume plummeted 18% in the first half of 2009, when the effort, from TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, asked and then answered "What is G?"
When asked if Gatorade would have cratered worse without the restaging, Ms. O'Hagan (Chief marketing officer for Gatorade) said, "None of us know." Sales, she said, "are just another dynamic in play." She added that Gatorade searches hit a five-year high in January, and the brand has generated three and a half times as much social-media interest as in 2008.

Harry Webber disagrees.
Reposted from a comment @ AD AGE

By HarryWebber.com | LOS ANGELES, CA August 10, 2009 08:10:16 pm:
"What is G" Ms. O'Hagan?

"G" is a 15 year-old serving triple life for mass murder over the color of a rag.

"G" is a 4 year old little girl hit by 4 9mm rounds fired into her birthday party by mistake.

"G" is her 16 year old mother cleaning her daughters face off a picket fence because nobody else dares go out to do it.

"G" is Continuing Revolution In Progress vs. Better Look Out Or Die for 24 years and tens of thousands of young lives.

"G" is the "final shade of red" you use in your billboards in LA.

"G" is "Cool cuzz I'm Blue" you use in your billboards in LA.

"G" has nothing to do with Gatorade. But you know that. You were hoping you could leverage the real meaning of "G" to sell your brand, but wound up selling your brand down the river.
Selling your children down the river.
Selling your race down the river
Selling your self down the river.

Back to the drawing board for the creative is it? Back to the drawing board after glorifying the genocide of an entire generation of city-bound teens and tweens.

And you have the nerve to ask "What Is G?"

The words of Mr. Ice-T answer it far better than I.

I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking

King of my jungle just a gangster stalking

Living life like a firecracker quick is my fuse

Then dead as a deathpack the colors I choose

Red or Blue, Cuz or Blood, it just don't matter

Sucker die for your life when my shotgun scatters

We gangs of L.A. will never die

All we know to do is just multiply.

Shame on you Ms. O'Hagen. You knew what "G" was when Chait Day brought it to you. Just like they knew it was time to move when the Venice Shoreline Crip Gang held their parking lot for ransom in the old neighborhood.

Shame on you Jimmy Smith for allowing the big white G to be posted on red and blue billboards and transit ads in the city you call home.

Shame on you Lee Clow. You knew what "G" meant when they brought you this campaign. You probably thought it was "Cool". It will not be cool where the three of you are heading.

Yet there you sit. Scratching your heads and your beards and wondering why it didn't work. Did you notice the mother's in Watts pouring Gatorade out in the streets? Or the preachers in South Philly vilifying Quaker from the pulpit? Of course you didn't. You were still patting yourselves on the back for using Jabbawokeez. People like you make me ashamed to work in advertising.

What is"G"?

Godless. Ms. O'Hagen. That's what you did Gatorade. Live with that for the rest of your life.