The Daily Whine

I finally got round to finishing the Sexiest Woman Alive issue of Esquire (the one with the Jessica Biehl cover), and strangely enough, I only have the faintest recollection of going through that story. Strange, because I’m a young, testosterone-spilling male living alone in a country where women wearing spaghetti straps are as uncommon as slim-line cops and bureaucrats, far away from a fiancee I haven’t seen in over a month — and I don’t remember much about the sexiest women alive (Jessica  Biehl et al). Either Esquire has made a terrible mistake, or I’ll be damned.

What I do remember, however, are a few extremely entertaining and even enlightening features. The Making of the Twenty-First Century Soldier, Part Three (you’ve got to pay to read this article though), for example, which caps off a brilliant series of observations about Colby Buzzell’s stint in Baghdad as an infantaryman. Or Thomas Barnett’s The Chinese Are Our Friends (this one, on the other hand, is free). Barnett’s the Jack Ryan-esque dude who penned the ‘Shrinking The Gap’ thesis (actually, the book was called The Pentagon’s New Map) for winning the peace in a threat environment that has changed far more drastically than Cold War strategists want to admit, (you can read the five-minute version here, thanks to Esquire again).

And then there’s Greetings From Idiot America and The Case for Intelligent Design (unfortunately, both are subscription-paid articles), which are a pair of features arguing for and against Intelligent Design. This was where I really got interested. Until these articles, I had absolutely no idea what Intelligent Design and Creationism were, much less that there had been a very public debate over them in the US. I did not realize that a school of thought centered around the idea that the great creator had planned everything  — both the good and the bad — according to His/Her/Its grand masterplan could be so (a) mainstream, (b) politicized and (c) contentious.

I’ll leave the debate to academics and politicians, especially since it’s obvious how little I know about this matter. Being in advertising, you’ll forgive me if I thought the articles were about how designers can raise the quality of their work by incorporating some not-so-common sense.

I kid you not. This is a big problem that concerns me, and if you had to work with designers on a daily basis, it’d be yours too. This isn’t about me griping that my colleagues don’t know left from right; this is me, as an insider, saying that in general, the ad industry is suffering from a serious lack of focus in the important stuff, the stuff that really matters.

Here’s how the debate over ‘Intelligent Design’ plays out for me:

Me: Why are we using blue-coloured wombats to sell this car?

Designer: I thought it would be cute.

Me: So we’re going for a cute ad?

Designer: Right. This is a family car, so we want to get the kids to like the ad.

Me: And it doesn’t matter to you that the kids probably have just enough money in their piggy banks to afford only the front seat cover?

Designer: They have immense influence over their parents’ purchasing decisions.

Me: So you think Daddy is going to buy this car because Junior likes wombats? Little aussie animals are more important than horsepower or fuel efficiency than?

Designer: It’s just one of many things that make the decision stick.

Me: Your wombats are taking up three quarters of the key visual. They’re larger than the product. They’ve got their noses in one another’s asses. No you’re right, they’re not too distracting.

Designer: Look, wombats are adorable. Everyone loves them.

Me: Okaaaaaaay. Let’s just say you’re right, wombats are the way to go. What’s with the blue colour? Alien wombats from Mars?

Designer: No reason in particular. Blue just looks nicer here. Stands out in contrast to the car’s metallic tan.

And this, my friends, is how advertising awards keep going to ads that don’t work, and designers whom no client-facing suits want to work with.

Yesterday, I learned that at a Warung here in Jakarta, there’s an interesting dish called Sotay, which is a combination of Soto and Satay.

This morning, I learned that if you have Sotay for lunch, you should be prepared to stay up all night.