14824: Thank God It’s Fitness Friday With Jordan Zimmerman. Not.

The ever-narcissistic Jordan Zimmerman inflates his over-pumped ego with Fitness Friday—coming off like a bizarro cross between Richard Simmons and Hans & Franz. Clearly, Zimmerman hasn’t found a camera angle he doesn’t love. Gotta wonder what the staff at his White advertising agency looks like. There must be a ton of body shaming directed at anyone not meeting Zimmerman’s standard of flexcellence.

14250: Apocalypse Wow.

Adweek published a lengthy report on Papa John’s, revealing former Chairman John Schnatter tapped Zimmerman Advertising and its Founder and Chairman Jordan Zimmerman earlier this year for direction on: 1) how to handle charges of racism on social media and; 2) how to convince Papa John’s executives to let Schnatter keep serving as the brand mascot. These revelations indicate Schnatter might be insane, at least by the standard often attributed to Albert Einstein that reads, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

First, as previously stated here, receiving advice on culturally competent communication from an advertising-media agency is like seeking unconscious bias training from the Ku Klux Klan. Schnatter has reportedly sought such guidance from Zimmerman and Laundry Service, and the latter helped ignite the N-word scandal that’s now plaguing the pizza company. Insanity and ignorance make for a toxic cocktail.

Second, Schnatter’s desire to remain the pizza face of Papa John’s displays the narcissistic and egomaniacal tendencies common in owners of local used car dealerships who insist on casting themselves and their spouses in campaigns. Insanity, ignorance, narcissism and egomania make for a potent poison.

Third, partnering with Zimmerman shows Schnatter is a mediocre moron. Plus, Adweek reported Schnatter and Zimmerman are old pals—which is not surprising—further indicating Schnatter resorts to cronyism. Insanity, ignorance, narcissism, egomania, mediocrity and cronyism make for a fatal concoction.

It’s only a matter of time before the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse make an appearance.

13230: Self-Seeking & Selfishness.

Adweek reported the Cannes Lionesses are seeking the “original Peggy Olsons” at Cannes. “We’re trying to find the first Lionesses, the original Peggy Olsons,” purred a Cannes Lioness. “Cannes has an amazing archive, but the data on female creatives doesn’t go that far back. They started in 1954, but [information about female creatives] from that date isn’t available. So we’re going to have to do a proper bit of detective work to find out who the original Lioness was.” Yes, let’s salute all the noble White women who blazed trails and—like their White male perpetrators/counterparts—completely ignored the people of color facing far more discrimination. Maybe the next sleuthing will uncover the original Dawn Chambers and Hollis.

2 Female Agency Creatives Are Trying to Track Down the ‘Original Peggy Olsons’ at Cannes

Finding the first Lionesses

By Kristina Monllos

Last year, after winning their first Cannes Lion, a pair of creatives from Mcgarrybowen in London, Holly Fallows and Charlotte Watmough, started a movement called Cannes Lionesses to champion female creatives at Cannes. This year, the women are back, and they’re on a mission to find the first female creative winner of the Cannes Gold Lion.

“We’re trying to find the first Lionesses, the original Peggy Olsons,” Fallows told Adweek. “Cannes has an amazing archive, but the data on female creatives doesn’t go that far back. They started in 1954, but [information about female creatives] from that date isn’t available. So we’re going to have to do a proper bit of detective work to find out who the original Lioness was.”

Fallows added, “We want to create this definitive list [of female creative Cannes Lions winners] from 1954 to 2016 so that we get this archive of amazing female creative talent that are winning awards. It’s to inspire people, really.”

During their time at Cannes this year, the duo is conducting interviews with past Cannes Lionesses including Grey’s Vicki Maguire, and Saatchi & Saatchi’s Kate Stanners and Rosie Arnold.

“We’ve set up loads of interviews with past winners, and we’re going to track down the winners from this year and interview them so the website can be more of a source of inspiration and motivation,” said Fallows.

Fallows and Watmough are also hoping anyone who knows of or has information about the first Cannes Lioness will reach out to them. They’re using the hashtag #canneslionesses on social media to spread their message.

“We were obviously aware that there’s a gender imbalance in the industry, but within our agency, it’s never been an issue,” said Fallows. “Winning the award made us realize, when we saw everyone walk up on stage and there weren’t any females, that’s when the penny dropped.”

13229: Cannes Lionesses And Liars.

Campaign published a call-to-arms from Cannes Lionesses—an example of diverted diversity worthy of a Glass Lion. Or an ADCOLOR® Award, at least. “The lack of senior female creative blights the industry and affects the work,” declared the Cannes Lionesses. “Without them the work simply does not represent the diversity demanded by today’s society. And that’s not what our clients want or what our consumers need.” Of course, the womanifesto does not extend its convictions to racial and ethnic diversity. Given that the predominately White women comprising the organization have likely done little to nothing to promote real diversity throughout their careers, this grand endeavor seems a tad narcissistic and hypocritical. The Lions and Lionesses could benefit from inviting a few Black Panthers too.

Cannes Lionesses hunt first females to take on the Lions

A lot of heat — but not a lot of light — has been generated by the gender diversity debate in advertising.

It is right for us as an industry to bemoan the lack of agency female representation, particularly in creative departments.

But we must do more

The lack of senior female creative blights the industry and affects the work. Without them the work simply does not represent the diversity demanded by today’s society. And that’s not what our clients want or what our consumers need.

The time has come to point out the obvious and truly celebrate female creativity; to ram home the reasons as to just why it is vital that the industry is more gender representative; to inspire the women who we hope will follow in our footsteps in ever increasing numbers.

On the prowl

Too few of us consider a career in creative, put off, perhaps, by its reputation as a “Mad Men” all boys club instead of championing our inner Peggy Olsons. Too many find it a struggle too far to clamber up the industry’s greasy pole and land those coveted senior creative roles. It’s not about tokenism; about employing or promoting women for women’s sake. It is more, much more, than that — about realising that an industry with too few senior females on board is missing out on so much. With more women that matter involved in creating advertising, the creative bar is set higher for everyone, men, women, clients, agencies and — ultimately — the consumer.

So where better to lead the charge than at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s most prestigious and publicised celebration of advertising (and more)?

For the second year running, two creatives at Mcgarrybowen London are proud to host the Cannes Lionesses — a website that celebrates and champions female creativity.

This year we’re going large — broadening and expanding the site to get even more women involved in the conversation.

Striking gold

By shining a light on brilliant and award-wining creativity we hope to shift the dial from the 267 female Cannes Lions winners last year (from a pool of thousands) to something rather more representative.

Our mission, in fact, is to seek out those first ever female creatives to strike Cannes gold.

The ambition of the website www.canneslionesses.com is to document all of the Cannes Lionnesses to have picked up metal from the festival’s launch in 1954 to the present day.

We will film this year’s crop of female Cannes winners and are sharing interviews with high profile winners from previous years and from across the globe.

Grey’s Vicki Maguire, Kate Stanners of Saatchi & Saatchi and Rosie Arnold, soon to join AMV BBDO from BBH, are among the (too few) female luminaries to be involved from the UK.

By offering advice and career tips to today and tomorrow’s crop of female creatives we hope to inspire women to push for their rightful places at Adland’s top tables.

But we can’t do it alone. We want — need — the advertising and wider marketing industries (including, yes, men) to join the conversation by using the hashtag #canneslionesses on social channels. We need them to get their rolodex out, ask their old boss to search out the first female Lions winners from back in the day and help us make the list complete.

You can also find Cannes Lionesses on Instagram and Twitter. Come on Cannes, help us roar!

12391: Altruism Or Adtruism?

Adweek published a perspective by Digital Brand Consultant Steve Hicks on altruism as a marketing technique and creative idea. Um, somebody tell Hicks that the advertising industry takes the truism out of altruism. The overwhelming majority of agencies pursue faux altruistic efforts for self-serving motives including wooing millennials or winning awards. Plus, the average advertiser allocates marketing dollars for faux altruistic projects to display its corporate soul to the public—usually in promotional, pathetic and patronizing fashion.

Altruism must be rooted in being of service to others, and placing others’ welfare ahead of your own. It takes a spiritual commitment and honestly believing in a greater good. Unfortunately, advertising agencies are in the service business—and service to self, clients and holding companies trumps service to our fellow man and woman. Advertisers are also in the service business—and service to CFOs and shareholders trumps service to our fellow man and woman. Hell, altruism shouldn’t even appear in the same sentence with advertising agencies or advertisers. What agencies and clients practice should be called something else—like adtruism.

Truly Altruistic Ads Don’t Just Raise Money, They Enrich the Culture

Stop do-gooding, start doing good

By Steve Hicks

In the good ol’ days before pesky digital came along, making content was a problem for the TV networks. Now, with social media and YouTube dominating our attention spans, it’s also a challenge that marketers and agencies must face daily.

And there’s one idea in this new reality that’s already becoming its own cliché: altruism.

I’m not talking about actual giving or good deeds. If you want to work in a soup kitchen or make a donation to charity or pour ice water on yourself, then you unquestionably should. I’m talking about do-gooding and altruism as a marketing technique and as a creative idea.

It’s a blight that particularly plagues digital, partly because digital embraces so many careers and disciplines that don’t involve the perceived cloven-hoofed immorality of (big A) Advertising—and also because the process of digital ideation thrives on user benefit. One way or another, I guarantee that “doing something for charity” will crop up in pretty much every brainstorm session you’ll ever have for digital content.

I’ll always support anything that helps move funds from the offshore accounts of giant corporations into the pockets of the needy. That’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s a creative cop-out—lacking the imagination to generate a powerful emotion, and we fill the void with pity for the unfortunate.

The problem is not with the intention. The problem occurs because for marketers, the giving is in the wrong currency.

Marketing is not investing. We are not a bank. Marketing is the business of generating and spreading thoughts, ideas, images and words. Not bullion. From ads to websites to vines to tweets, we make cultural artifacts. The river that marketing swims in isn’t made of cash; it’s made of culture.

We all want to give back and be altruistic. And we all want to make work that’s famous, has a usage for our audiences and wins awards.

The wonderful thing is, if you treat culture like it is a bank, then you’ll be many steps closer to achieving all those goals.

From VW’s Darth Vader to Oreo’s Facebook posts, great, famous and effective work has a single commonality: They all made investments into our shared cultural bank. They gave us something to talk about, share and enjoy.

It’s not something you can do all the time. By necessity a lot of marketing has to make cultural withdrawals, be it borrowing equity from celebrity or from third-party content.

Your agency’s mission might be to win awards or be famous or serve consumers or maybe just do something that your mom has actually heard of. These are not objectives but rather side effects of what happens when your work makes cultural investments.

So, why not make 2015 the year to up the proportion of your cultural deposits? Simply make it part of your process to ask, “Does this idea enrich or deplete culture?”

To help you on your way, here are four tips that can springboard culturally valuable content ideas.

1. Short-handing and naming

Take a nebulous thing/action/insight that takes a lot of words to express and give it a name. The shorter the better. “Wassup,” “Priceless,” “Boom Chicka Wah Wah” give us the ability to express complex ideas in brief.

2. Is it replicable?

Can your idea be used in common conversation not related to your product? Does it allow for a joke? “I don’t always eat moldy cheese, but when I do…”

3. Novelty

We don’t say, “An interactive film experience that cleverly uses real user content.” Instead we say, “Something like Museum of Me.” We don’t say, “Provocative, sexy and challenger-brand like.” We say, “Like Axe.” If you have a hard time giving your executional technique a name, then you are probably creating something new and culturally valuable.

4. Reflect a truth

Does your communication hold up a mirror to the world and show it a truth? “Think Different” and “Think Small” share more than a verb. They succinctly articulate truths that before we saw them we didn’t realize we believed.

If you have an idea that distributes some wealth—do it. Unquestionably. But if you have an idea that might get famous, win an award or become colloquial—do that too. Shamelessly. Just because it benefits your business doesn’t mean it won’t benefit us all, and our industry will be able to look back at 2015 and feel proud that it made our culture, and hence our world, a wealthier place.

Steve Hicks (@TwitH1x) is a digital brand consultant and was the creative co-founder of mcgarrybowen’s digital practice.

6665: The New N-Word…?

From Newsweek…

Generation Me

A new book says we’re in a narcissism epidemic. Why you’re not so special.

By Raina Kelley

Growing up, my literary heroines were those who, like me, struggled to be good: Jo from “Little Women,” Harriet the spy, Laura Ingalls and Pippi Longstocking. A strong-willed (and loud) child, I craved examples of unruly knuckleheads tethered to a loving family that encouraged us to be our best selves despite our natural inclinations. Precocious but naive, I thought of myself as an ugly duckling—misunderstood in my youth but destined for a beauty and stature completely impossible for my loved ones to comprehend. I shudder to think what a monster I would have become in the modern child-rearing era. Gorged on a diet of grade inflation, constant praise and materialistic entitlement, I probably would have succumbed to a life of heedless self- indulgence.

Perhaps, one day, we will say that the recession saved us from a parenting ethos that churns out ego-addled spoiled brats. And though it is too soon to tell if our economic free fall will cure America of its sense of economic privilege, it has made it much harder to get the money together to give our kids six-figure sweet-16 parties and plastic surgery for graduation presents, all in the name of “self esteem.” And that’s a good thing, because as Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell point out in their excellent book “The Narcissism Epidemic,” released last week, we’ve built up the confidence of our kids, but in that process, we’ve created a generation of hot-house flowers puffed with a disproportionate sense of self-worth (the definition of narcissism) and without the resiliency skills they need when Mommy and Daddy can’t fix something.

Indeed, when Twenge addressed students at Southern Connecticut State University a couple weeks back, their generation’s narcissism was taken as a given by her audience. The fact that nearly 10 percent of 20-somethings have already experienced symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, compared with just over 3 percent of the 65-and-over set? Not surprising. That 30 percent of college students agree with the statement: “If I show up to every class, I deserve at least a B”? Didn’t get much of a rise either. When they’re faced with the straight-out question—do you agree with this research, that you guys are the most narcissistic generation ever—there are uniform head nods and knowing grins to each other. “At the end of the day I love me and I don’t think that’s wrong,” says Sharise Tucker, a 21-year-old senior at Southern Connecticut State, a self-professed narcissist. “I don’t think it’s a problem, having most people love themselves. I love me.”

But as Twenge goes on to illustrate, all that narcissism is a problem that can range from the discourteous—residential advisers at Southern lament students disregarding curfews, playing dance music until 3 a.m., demanding new room assignments at a moment’s notice and failing to understand why professors won’t let them make up an exam they were too hung over to take—to the disastrous—failed marriages, abusive working environments and billion-dollar Ponzi schemes. Seems that the flip side of all that confidence isn’t prodigious success but antisocial behavior.

Armed with a steady influx of trophies just for showing up, “I Am Special” coloring books and princess parties, it is hard for kids to understand why an abundance of ego might be bad for them. Hot off their own rebellions in the late ‘60s, my parents struggled to give me the freedom to be me while also teaching me generosity, compassion and humility. I didn’t make it easy on them. I was the kind of kid who threatened to drink Drano if asked to load the dishwasher. “Don’t get cocky, kid,” was the response from my dad when I declared my grades too good for my behavior to be monitored. “Pretty girls are a dime a dozen,” my mother would remind me when I came up with the brilliant idea that school was getting in the way of my social life. My mom would also trot out fables to keep me in check. Ever read the original ending to Cinderella? The evil stepsisters get their eyes plucked out by pigeons and end up beggars. But it worked, mostly, and “Don’t believe your own bulls—t” became my mantra. Of course, I still hate to be told what to do, dislike following rules and will waste hours trying to get out of the simplest household task; but hey, I’m a work in progress.

But no matter how you were raised, the handiest cure for narcissism used to be life. Whether through fate, circumstances or moral imperative, our culture kept hubris in check. Now, we encourage it. Pastors preach of a Jesus that wants us to be rich. The famously egocentric wide receiver Terrell Owens declares at a press conference that being labeled selfish is fine with him. Donald Trump names everything he owns after himself and calls his detractors “losers.” We live in a world where everyone can be a star—if only on YouTube. The general sense among students on that New Haven campus is that with the world being such a competitive, cutthroat place, they have to be narcissists. Well, you may need a supersize ego to win “America’s Next Top Model” or to justify your multimillion dollar bonus. But last I checked, most of our lives don’t require all that attitude. Treating the whole world as if it works for you doesn’t suggest you’re special, it means you’re an ass. As an antidote to a skyrocketing self-worth, Twenge recommends humility, evaluating yourself more accurately, mindfulness and putting others first. Such values may seem quaint, maybe even self-defeating, to those of us who think we’re special, but trust me: it gets easier with practice.

With Sarah Kliff