#threeps

This was the most ridiculous prompt yet!! The theme: Graduation. Words to include: Eggs, Underpants, Emma, Threeps.

Sigh.

Graduation day is going to be interesting.

is my effing favorite. I usually dig around for the cookie dough chunks right away and run out of them far too quickly. The way I eat chocolate chip cookie dough is practically a metaphor of my life. Since I was little girl, I've wanted things right when I felt like having them- patience has not been my virtue. & I don't mean "wanted things" in the context of material things, I mean wanted things in the context of experiences. When I was 5, my family and I lived on Fisher Ave in a small town in Jersey called Bound Brook. We lived with my aunt & uncle & cousins and had more cousins down the street and my best friend lived across the street- that's just the kind of town it was, everyone you needed was close. I, however, wasn't satisfied with everyone I had nearby. And so, without telling anyone, I went on an adventure of my own.

It was only next door, c'mon, I don't get what the big fuss was about. My parents weren't amused and lacked any sort of imagination I guess 'cause they could not find me anywhere. This was the second time I ever got an ass whipping but, as most psychologists will confirm, punishment is not the way to rehabilitate.

And so, my ass kept exploring. 

Exactly 10 years later, I went on another series of adventures and had the most epic ass whipping, but that, my friends, is a story for another time. Today I want to talk to you about patience- yeah that's what this is actually about. 

For those of you who are as curious in life as I am, explore, explore, explore. There is no greater regret than feeling like you didn't do all that you could have- in any aspect of your life. But be patient, otherwise you will miss out on so much that's right in front of you simply because you were too busy chasing things that didn't come to you, or that were foreign to you, or that simply seemed better than they were. Don't get me wrong, never be afraid to go after what you want! I do not apologize for how deliberate I am with my words or my actions. But in life we have to learn to wait a little, to slow down, so that once the dry spell is over we can see things with clarity and not with thirst. No, this doesn't apply only to sexual things or relationships, this applies to everything. I've finally learned at the beautiful and (somewhat) sobering age of 25 that had I learned to wait and plan at a young age, I may have been able to enjoy certain stages in my life a little more. 

Its funny though, cause I know that some of you who know me and are reading this are like "bitch, you know you had maaaaaaad fun" and I suuuuure did (lol) but I didn't start planning my future until very recently and well hindsight has a way with things.

I swear, hindsight is the only bitch I know.  

In Business School I've learned the three P's of Sustainability: people, planet, & profit. A business model should be built around these three things in order to maximize success on all fronts. Sustainability is in fact a major driver of innovation and cost reduction which will  give you a huge competitive advantage. Now lets make this a metaphor of YOUR life:

Patience, Persistence, & Pride should be your three p's. Be patient to see things objectively and to recognize the way something will best serve you. Be persistent about what you want and what you need to get done. &Take pride in everything that has your name attached to it. 

Response of Marcus John Henry Brown to my shout-out: 

"Creative genius and marketing enfant terrible, tell us why marketing is generally doomed and how someone can at all be able to create something useful in a marketing context?"   

   Marketing isn’t doomed. What nonsense. Just because marketing and advertising are part of a commercial system that appears to be morally bankrupt, it doesn’t mean that marketing as a practice is about to pack its bags and shuffle off the mortal coil. As I’ve told you many times before, the usefulness of marketing focuses on selling products that noone really wants or needs which, within a capitalist system, is perfectly legitimate. You, dearest Thomas, have always had a romantic view of what marketing can do for the world: change it, make it better, improve the lives of others, save lives, etc, etc but you always forget marketing’s key dependency - the product. 

Young people in suits spend an awful lot of money on private marketing schools to learn stuff like “the three p’s” and other nonsense (like algebra, for fuck’s sake), and everything they learn (and pay huge amounts of money for the pleasure) revolves around marketing’s dependency on the product and being paid to sell stuff. “Putting a brand meaningfully into people’s lives” has, over the course of the last eight years, become a terribly en vogue thing to preach at marketing conferences, and it also looks grand on a LinkedIn account but it’s bullshit. People want to put a brand meaningfully into their mouths because they are hungry, or sit meaningfully in a brand because they need to travel to work. They do not ask their children to move over on the sofa so that a brand can sit in their place.

Your job isn’t to improve the lives of others and we are most certainly not enablers of conversations between brands, products and the consumers. The idea that people want to talk to brands is one of the biggest scams our industry has ever cooked up. It’s a lie. Talk about brands? Maybe. Talk to brands? No. As marketers and advertisers we dance with the devil every time we go to work, for heaven’s sake. We pour over data trying to find the emotional weak spot for something called “the target group”. The weak spot we call an insight. We then try and build various models of deceit by which we intend to trick these poor people into believing that they really need a yogurt that’s going to stop them from farting, or a shampoo that will dope their hair (and only their hair) or a car that will make their penis larger. This deceit we call “the creative”. Sometimes we’re really devious and create campaigns (we really do love our war terminology in this industry) that appear to be doing something helpful, useful and good, like Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign and for a brief moment in time it appeared that capitalism wasn’t that bad after all until we realised that Unilever (who produce Dove) also produce a skin whitening product in Asia. And even if you’re marketing something that is intended to do good, such as saving whales, the environment, people dying of AIDS, Ebola or hunger you would still employ the same thinking and tactics and you are still trying to sell something to people who don’t want to know about it. 

Does that make us bad people. Yes, yes I suppose it does. Is it fun, productive, creative and do people, real people, like the work we do? Yes, sometimes they do. And when we find the weak spot and push all of the right emotional buttons at exactly the right times then, yes, we can actually move people and change their perception about a specific thing.

We can make people cry.

It’s not magic - it’s science. It’s not art - it’s business.

We can, however, employ these skills to draw attention to matters of real importance and yes, it is also possible to include a brand or a product within this setting, but the context has to be bang on. I’m actually working on a project for a commercial client that isn’t trying to sell a product but is actually trying to make the world a safer and better place. Is it a campaign? Sure, but it’s still a remarkable route for a commercial client to take and I’m proud of them and proud to be involved.

The Gaslight Hotel AU for Russell Crowe characters is looking for someone for Bud…he’s awful lonely…  www dot gaslighthotel dot net