Quiet time

Ad agencies are inherently loud places.

Even before open space floor plans – don’t get me started- hallways would be filled with people yelling from one office to the other.

You'd hear self-congratulatory chuckles of creative teams laughing at their own ideas.

Heels tapping along polished cement floors, while people walked fast and conversed like they were on The West Wing.

And of course, the ever present click clack of computer keys, followed by the jet engine roar of the printer firing up and spitting out copies of resumes…er…creative briefs.

There’s an unmistakable rhythm, hum and drone to the daily pace of an agency. Which is why it’s so eerie when an agency goes quiet.

Sometimes it’s a convergence of several things. People have left or been let go and have yet to be replaced. Others are out on production. Art directors are out on press checks. Copywriters are working (on our lattes) at Starbucks. People are behind closed doors in meetings.

The end result is an unsettling, yet welcome quiet. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds a blowin’ down the hallway and smell the honeysuckle.

Anyway, as sure as the the ebb and flo of the tide, the noise eventually returns to quiet agencies like swallows to Capistrano.

Loud, egotistical, long-lunching, knit-cap wearing, ironic-tshirt sporting, complaining swallows.

I can't wait to see how it ends

Advertising has never been shy about being behind the bandwagon, then jumping on it and saying they've been steering it the whole time. It's also a business that's never met a buzzword it didn't like.

If you've been on any agency website recently, usually in the About section, you've probably noticed the unholy alliance of bandwagon with the buzzword du jour: Storytellers.

Apparently agency creative departments aren't staffed with copywriters and art directors anymore. Instead, they've been replaced by storytellers.

I get it. It's a romantic notion, and it plays well in pitches where the client is told how the "story" of their brand will be conveyed to the waiting masses. Like many other things in advertising, it's hyperbole.

It's the janitor calling himself a sanitation engineer.

I can't exactly tell you why this trend pisses me off so much. Maybe because it's so blatantly untrue. Or the image it conjures up is of someone who's facile with exaggeration, able to spin a yarn or an impossible - and unbelievable - tale out of thin air.

And if there's anything advertising needs to be more of, it's unbelievable.

Storytellers, the really good ones, are skilled at the practiced art of spinning straw into gold. But when the story's over, compelling though it may be, you're still left with straw.

Storytellers, brand stewards, marketing gurus (yes that was on one of the sites), dynamic social directives officers. Whatever. It all sounds false and a little desperate to me.

As for the agencies who insist on calling themselves that, I believe their future can be summed up in two words found in every story.

Punctuation doesn't suck

Grammar's a hard thing to muster a lot of excitement about. And since I pass myself off as a writer, I have this secret shame I don't know as much as I should about it. The dreaded semi-colon? No idea if I'm using it the right way or not. At least in the three times in my life I've used it (two of which are in this post).

My friend Julie Prendiville gave me the best book on grammar I've ever read: The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. It makes grammar interesting, fun, and more importantly, important. (any number of writers could've done a better job with that last sentence. Don't think I didn't notice).

Anyway, it's been a long time since she gave me the book, and equally as long since I've read it. But as a result of the rapidly fading use of proper grammar, I'll be picking it up again soon. I can't stand the thought I might be part of what I consider the dumbing down of writing, even if I am part of a business that makes up words like stroft (Charmin - strong & soft), powercision (Hyundai - power & precision, or circumcision; was never sure which), funified (Chuck E. Cheese; false advertising at its best), freshalicious (Subway) and a million more.

In case you're wondering, the quick way to a dumb, new ad word is to combine two ordinary words into a colossally stupid one. Or just add -licious, -centric, -tastic, -esque or -opolooza to one.

Look, I know I'm not the only writer who's frustrated by the disappearance of proper punctuation. Most noticeably periods. I'm not sure when it happened, although it was probably around the time the first web designer/art director said, "Do we really need that period in the headline? I don't know, it doesn't look right." And naturally since art directors are well known for their legendary grasp of grammar and spelling, the (junior) writer he worked with went along with it.

The thing about punctuation is that it isn't only a design element. It's an essential tool in making written words read and feel as much like spoken conversation as possible.

So when I drive down the 405 - and by drive I mean crawl - looking at outdoor headlines with no periods, it's frustrating. Same with almost every headline anywhere on the interwebs. It's almost as if the laziness of abbreviated txtng has crept into everything.

Without periods, headlines are incomplete. They float. They're wishy-washy. They're not definitive, confident statements about the product.

I'm not letting myself off the hook either. I rarely use punctuation on my post titles. I'm not proud of it. I promise to do better from now on.

Not just for my readers, but for grandpa.