erniesblog

Kid Art

Georgia's art.  Robot.  6.5 feet tall.  She had help cutting wood to her specs, hammering a couple of nails, and installing legs.  Two views.

Jackson's Art.  Spikey ball thing.  Temporary.  Already disassembled.  Three views.

The long pole

Never mind the long tail.  What's your long pole?

The dad of one of Jackson's fellow Cub Scouts recently emailed about his son's progress toward the Wolf badge, singling out the requirement to make a chart of household duties, and keep it regularly for at least a month, as the Long Pole in the Tent.  I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about, because Jackson, while screaming through the other requirements, has become stymied by this whole chart thing, or rather, by the need to actually keep up with the chart thing.  So the chart is Jackson's Long Pole, too -- it's holding everything up.

A useful expression, I think.  Here, William Safire discusses it at length in the NYT Magazine.  You might need a subscription -- I'm not sure.  Surprisingly to me, I have one -- so, if you need one, it must be free.

The Cub/dad email got me thinking about my own various Long Poles.

When it comes to client work, I find that the Long Pole tends to materialize somewhere in the neighborhood of "new things we're not quite sure about and might possibly be afraid of."  Though the web is tailor-made for experimentation, little else in advertising has been for the past fifty or so years -- so the fear of new things easily and regularly becomes a Long Pole.  Education can help this particular pole, most of the time.  This is one I don't take personally - it's just one I run into.  The personal one is next, and much harder to solve.  At least it is for me.

When it comes to creating things other than immediate work assignments; creating anything, sometimes including immediate work assignments; making moving images, which I get very few opportunities to do at work, but which I love to do, and can do, noting that it's how I made my living for 15 years -- my personal Long Pole is time.  Or, rather, the shortage of it.  There's simply not enough time to make stuff.  Or, at least, to make stuff right.  One of the downsides to an always -on society and industry is that if you're not always on, you'll soon be off. Which means your time is spoken for.  And if you want to use time to do anything other than what has spoken for it, finding time can become a Long Pole.  The economy has shifted a lot of advertiser activity to the digital space, which simply means there are now more things speaking for time that's already spoken for, and the Long Pole in my personal tent is getting much longer.  I'm not sure how to shorten it, but when I get time, I'll think about it.

So, what's your long pole?  Time? Money? Fear?  Could be anything, I suppose, including an aversion to keeping a chore chart for a month.  The point is, you can't do anything to change, eliminate, or finally raise the Long Pole in the Tent until you've identified it.

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Fun with animated stills

YouTube's compression sucks.  But this was fun.  A few bursts from a still camera, and a sequential file import.  A couple of filters, and a quick Garage Band track.  The real thing looks a lot better than the YouTube version -- I gotta start posting on Vimeo.

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Of Course, This Makes Sense

A colleague sent me this post,  saying, "Maybe they read your eBook." 
The stick was just entered into the toy hall of fame.
Which makes perfect sense. Maybe they did read the book.

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Evolution

Thank you for reading.  

Once a week, for a very long time now, I've spouted off about advertising.  Mostly interactive advertising.  Before that, I spouted off more often.  An awful lot of you read my spoutings regularly.  Thank you.

I also spout off, though less, um…spoutingly, on adotas.com once a month, and whenever I can (which, I'm told, isn't often enough) on the Brunner Digital blog.  That's a whole lot of Ernie-opinions to digest.  And I want to sincerely say, "thanks for reading."

I also want to say I'm thinking about evolving this particular blog.

A funny thing happens to you when you're a creative.  If you're good -- meaning, if you win lots of business, or lots of awards, or lots of both, you get promoted.  Then you get promoted again.  You get wiser, and older, and if you stay good, you continue to move up the agency ladder.  Except… 

Except the things you're expected to be good ad change.  Your job changes.  If you're a great art director, or a great writer, or a person who's great at making great things, there's a sure bet in the agency world that you will quickly (or, at least, eventually) find yourself in a position in which you make exactly nothing.  Except phone calls.  And meetings.  The wisdom is, "You're such a great creative, we simply must turn you into a manager."  Why that's wisdom, I don't know.  I'm too resigned to fight it.

What I'm getting to is this:  Blogging is kinda the same thing.  Or at least, it has been for me.  When I started blogging, it was on the heels of my eBook, Use A Stick, and it was at the very beginning of the groundswell of forward-thinking agency people blogging about how backward-looking agency people were going to have problems in a world where people can blog about the fact that you're having problems keeping up.  That whole groundswell turned into a tsunami, and the problems are still there, and people are still not keeping up, and the changes just keep coming, just like I and countless others continue to blog about.  It's kind of a sea of the same thing.  Occasionally, real solutions are offered up, but more often than not, the juicy stuff is too good to blog about -- at least until you can prove without a doubt that it cannot really be monetized, and therefore is fine to share with the world.

In short, I miss making stuff, just for the joy of making stuff.  And I want to spend more time making stuff.  So something is going to have to adjust.  Not go.  Adjust. 

I'm thinking about evolving this blog to be a little more personal, and a little more filled with stuff I make, just because I want to make it.  Some of it will be advertising.  Some of it will be art.  A lot of it won't be either.  But all of it will be something I make because I want to make it.

I hope you'll hit the archives, and read through some of my opinions on the state of the industry at any given point in time.  I'll probably do a post that highlights some of the stuff I think is most worth your time.  And then I'll post a picture of something I made, or saw, or thought, just because.  Because I don't spend enough time doing that -- at work, or otherwise.

I hope you'll continue to read, subscribe, and share.  Because this is, after all, an evolution.  I want to use the blog to enhance my craft, by giving me a place to expose what I craft, rather than just giving me a place to talk about what I craft. (I'll, of course, continue to do that on adotas and Brunner Digital, though.)

It makes sense to me.  Hopefully, as it evolves, it will to you, too.

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