Gimme a Break: Part 2 of 2
By Jeff Einstein

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with
the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
– Will Rogers

In Part 1 of Gimme a Break, I suggested that the reason why
advertising doesn’t work very well anymore is because we’ve
essentially eliminated the commercial break from our lives
– especially during the commercial break, which nowadays
more closely resembles a digital feeding frenzy, and hence
destroys the very ad model it’s designed to serve. In fact,
our entire on-demand lives have devolved into extended
digital feeding frenzies, with no time for reflection, no
tolerance whatsoever for intrusion, and no breaks from the
media action.

What bothers me most about the current state of advertising
and marketing, however, is how utterly predatory and
atavistic we’ve become since the mid-1990s, when twenty-
something digital evangelists decided that advertisers
and marketers should a) engage in brand dialogues with
consumers (mostly because there was suddenly a shitload of
new digital technology to foist on them), and b) conduct
said brand dialogues in a thoroughly mediated and seamless
digital world, which of course renders impossible the
requisite intrusion and time to establish and maintain any
meaningful dialogue – brand or otherwise – with anyone.
Baffled and besieged, older, more sober generations of
advertisers and marketers deferred immediately and stepped
aside, mostly because they couldn’t reboot their own
computers without the help of the twenty-somethings. The
days of the commercial break were clearly numbered.

Of course the predatory attribute I assigned above should
not be confused with anything or anyone forward-thinking
or proactive, and is wholly reactive instead (hence its
atavistic nature), far more akin to the desperate pride of
lions that haunts a watering hole during a deadly drought
than the same willful pride that hunts at night when water
and game are plentiful. Thus today’s generation of
advertisers and marketers, all clustered like starving
lions around the same watering hole, truly believe that
they owe their jobs to consumer opinion, and are therefore
compelled to react like lemmings as quickly as possible
to perceived consumer demand – with every digital
technology in their arsenal. By contrast, their displaced
predecessors knew otherwise: that there is no such thing
as consumer demand except to the extent that marketers
and advertisers create it. The good ones knew something
else also: that job one in creating consumer demand was
to create and protect the integrity of the commercial
break, what Bill Bernbach called the environment to buy.

But how can we possibly expect others to take a break long
enough to engage our brand messages if we can’t take one
for ourselves? Remember, we as marketers and advertisers
create and shape consumer demand. And if we can’t control
how we spend our own time, how can we as marketers and
advertisers possibly hope to influence how others spend
theirs?

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The following is an excerpt from a recent post I made to
the Oldtimers Foundation listserv:

To the question of how we can affect change in the midst
of our day jobs and selfish best interests, I would reply,
“First, slow down.” Our agendas are already far too full
and far too hectic to engage in or otherwise entertain
meaningful thought and discourse. We’ve turned time — our
only real inventory — into an enemy. We cannot begin to
accommodate new thoughts and behaviors unless and until
we find a way to intervene in our own lives long and
frequently enough to prepare the soil of our souls for new
seeds. We cannot affect meaningful change in ourselves or
others unless and until we reclaim our time.

Of course the reclamation of our time is easier said than
done, but — in all earnestness — I would suggest the
following remedial steps:

1. Change your career objective right now. Aspire instead
to take a nap, go for a walk, read a good novel or other-
wise tune out completely for at least an hour during the
course of each work day. No digital devices or electronic
media allowed (with the sole exception of music). We spend
our entire work lives striving for the moment when we can
retire, put our feet up, and take a nap. My suggestion
therefore is to eliminate the career middle man and head
straight for the nap. You (and just about everyone else
you know) will thank me later. It ain’t about money at
the end of the day; it’s about time, and how and where
and with whom we spend it. The rest of your work day will
fall magically into place once you aspire — first and
foremost — to take a nap as your new career objective.

2. Be conscious of your tools. Move your personal and
professional communications up the emotional impact ladder
at every opportunity. In other words, consciously choose
communications tools that require more deliberation and
deliver more heart and soul — like a phone call or a well-
crafted letter or a face-to-face meeting over an email,
text message or tweet — whenever possible. Always choose
quality over quantity (because it’s always your choice),
and always choose deliberateness over speed; don’t
communicate on the run except in emergencies. Remember:
speed kills.

3. Resist the narcotic impulse to check your email inbox
for the first hour of every day. Each time you sit down
first thing in the morning to check your email inbox, you
automatically put your own agenda dead last behind the
collective agendas of all the emails you find there. In
doing so you invite a purely reactive mindset that forces
you to play catchup for the balance of your day (and life).

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Each of the above suggestions requires time and conscious
deliberation. But that’s the point. We can choose to
intervene in our own lives and industry or someone or
something else will intervene for us — guaranteed.

Advertisers, take a nap, and when you wake up encourage
your agency contacts to take a nap also. Mandate a no-
email period each morning. Get them out of the fire-
fighting business and into the fire-starting business.
Their performance will improve and so will yours.

Agencies, create a digital media-free area where your
employees can sit down and talk quietly, read a book, or
just stretch out and take a nap. Their performance will
improve and so will yours.

Time is of the essence, but only when we honor it, only
when we befriend it. Consider therefore the words of Jim
Goodwin and Sydney J. Harris:
“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”

And entertain right now the sage advice of Lily Tomlin:
“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.”

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About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help
define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic
media environment.

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