A few weeks ago, the CEO of fast-food chain “Chick-fil-A” came out in an interview and stated his position on “traditional” marriage – essentially stating his disapproval of same-sex marriage. Needless to say, this ignited a firestorm of controversy resulting in both sides of the “same-sex marriage” debate vocally taking sides. Those in favour of same-sex marriage were quick to call for boycotts of the fast-food chain. Those in agreement with the CEO’s position were quick to mobilize as well – calling for people to come out and support the chain – whether they’re usual customers or not. My guess would be, sadly, that business is probably up for Chick-fil–A although I have no idea if that’s the case or not.

Now, yes, the United States is increasingly a country of extreme viewpoints, but is the politicization of brands an inevitable outcome? How much longer before The CEO of McDonald’s is questioned about his stance on Abortion? And how long before someone asks the CEO of the GAP about their views on Natural Selection? Will consumers soon be requesting the political views of a company’s  leader before they make their purchase decisions? How long before changerooms ring with the refrain “these pants look great on me but I’ll pass because their CEO is a Republican.”

All this to say, is this really necessary? On one hand, it’d be nice to sit down to a meal without having to Google the social and political leanings of the Board of Directors before I order. On the other hand, I don’t really want to put money into the pocket of someone whose views I find repugnant.

It’s a complex question with no simple answers. Personally, I suspect that ignorance is bliss when it comes to the politicization of brands. And as for Chick-fil-A, well, I’m a KFC guy anyway.

This recent “thunderclap” has been making the rounds on FB and caught my attention. It’s all about trying to end unpaid internships:

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/48-end-unpaid-internships/invited/4025

This is an age old argument in the agency world. One side decrees “interns are paid with experience.” The other side pontificates that “an unpaid internship is tantamount to slave labour.” Polarizing to be sure. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle, which, incidentally,  is Grip’s approach.

What’s your perspective? To pay or not to pay?

It appears that we only have two more installments left in our series of 101 Thoughts on Advertising. What we will do with this collection of random impressions – only time will tell.

With that, we continue to suppose that

Advertising is:

82) Basically selective disclosure
83) Moving from being an exercise in creativity to an exercise in entrepreneurialism
84) Soooo navel gaze-y
85) One of those industries where the highs are really high, and the lows are devastating
86) Not about coming up with ideas, it’s about selling them
87) Generally worth all those risks
88) Mostly accomplished in the shower
89) Less about tracking trends than anticipating them
90) Curated human insight
91) Pretty emotional, man

Ad Buzz’s “What you weren’t taught in school” event is coming up tomorrow.

From the site: “Your school might have taught you how to develop concepts, big ideas and strategies. They might have even taught you the secrets of research, media buying and art direction. It’s now time to take your advertising knowledge to the next level, beyond what your school can or has offered you.

It’s time to learn how to not end up being a f*ck-up. Be taught how to avoid becoming that person everybody hates and fantasizes about punching in the throat. Uncover the truths of how to get in, fit in and be amazing in the advertising industry. All it takes is one night with a hand full of stellar industry professionals to set you straight and in gear towards success.”

Tickets are $25 and are available here.

I expected a lot of things when I decided to try working in advertising. Late nights. Tight deadlines. A job you actually want to come to everyday. Thankfully, the course of my career has allowed me to experience each of these things. But I didn’t expect to become a sounding board for everything everyone hates about advertising.

Thanks to Mad Men, some people seem to think they have a good idea of what makes for a good ad. I now find myself getting regular complaints from my parents, roommate, friends and people I meet at parties about some bad ad they saw. They ask me things like “How did it even get made?” “What is it supposed to mean?” and “Who comes up with this shit?”

Depending on the ad, my responses are usually, “I don’t know,” “I don’t know,” and, sometimes, “I do.” Sometimes I’ll tell them the ad probably started off based on an insight from their target consumer, and since they’re not the target, they might not get it. Then there are blank stares and things get kind of awkward. I’ve found it’s easier to just say “I don’t get it either” with a shrug and a shake of the head.

I’d rather take the blame for advertising than try to break down all the reasons why an ad could’ve gone wrong (frankly it’s often not even an ad done by an agency – thanks, local cable.) If I didn’t write it, it doesn’t bother me. Rather than try to exonerate myself from their blame, I’ve come to accept it as part of the job. Advertising is a public medium, so it’s bound to happen.

And, make no mistake, when you first meet someone and you tell them you work in advertising, it instantly alters their perception of you. You’re part of an industry that is seemingly widely regarded by the public as being somehow bad or evil. You’re responsible for interrupting their favourite TV shows, dominating their web browsing or insinuating your brands into their YouTube procrastination time.

I’m okay with that, even if I don’t totally get it. Because I have friends who work in retail, but I don’t blame them when I have a lousy customer service experience somewhere. And I wouldn’t blame a friend who’s a mechanic if mine messed up my car.

But hey, they don’t get to work in advertising.

It happened again.

“Come on team, let’s go nip it in the butt.”

Instead of the usual internal sigh or impromptu grammar lesson that these blunders often inspire, this one never fails to make me giggle. There’s just something inherently charming about somebody innocently—and unbeknownst to them, incorrectly—saying the word ‘butt’.

“Nip it in the butt.” The only thing better than hearing this hilarious slip-up is hearing someone trying to justify it. They’ll tell you that nipping someone in the butt would likely stop him or her from doing whatever it was they were doing because, well, getting bit in the butt would surely grab anyone’s attention. I’d say that this would be, at best, only a temporary distraction. Or, perhaps I’d argue that this incorrect saying prompts the exact opposite response. When we say, “light a fire under someone’s butt” it’s universally understood that this means to expedite something. In this case, it seems that threatening someone’s posterior actually encourages action, instead of halting it.

Next time, might I suggest nipping it in the bud?

“Nip it in the bud” is a saying that stems from horticulture (stems, get it?) When you nip a tree in the bud, you literally prevent it from flowering completely. When used metaphorically, it means to put a stop to something before it has the chance to worsen—far more effective than the slight distraction caused by a meager bite on the bum, if you ask me.

For the love of language, if you have to nip something, make it a bud.

There is a popular notion that people are getting stupider. But what if that’s an over simplification? What if people are just as stupid as they’ve always been, but it’s just easier to get caught nowadays? Pause your Dancing with the Stars PVR and lend me your ear; I propose that the path of today’s moron is beset with the pitfalls of the technological era.

In the good ol’ days, felons could just stroll in, stick a gun in some clerk’s chest and make off with the loot. Today, that same hold-up might result in a log-in. Just ask the Colombian burglar who checked his Facebook in the midst of robbing an Internet café…and forgot to log out.

Or witness the case of Michael Baker. After taking a break from what I can only assume was his doctoral candidacy work, he decided to siphon gas. From a police car. And take a picture. And put it on Facebook. Inexplicably, these decisions led to his capture and arrest.

My personal favourite, both due to the high-tech nature of the justice and the composed, nonchalance of the victim, is the story of Katy McCaffrey and her stolen iPhone. In years past, a thief would have gotten away no problem after having stolen an old Polaroid or even a digital camera. But thanks to Katy’s photostream account, she was able to see every photo the thief — an employee of the cruise ship she had vacationed on — had taken. This lead to the return of her iPhone and the firing of Nelson, former cruise ship worker and amateur photographer.

Moral of the story? It’s always been easy to do something dumb – but making it your status update? That’s next level.

In 2004 a very good friend of ours was diagnosed with breast cancer. This stunning news lead to our decision in 2005 to help launch Yard Sale for the Cure. Yard Sale for the Cure is now recognized by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation as second only to the Run for the Cure in order of priority. In fact, the endeavor has the full weight of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation behind it, adding real scale to the effort. As it stands, it’s already an incredible legacy for Rachael Smith and her husband Andrew Howard, who simply wanted to give back to the community that helped her successfully battle the disease.

Rachael has an incredible way of describing the impact cancer has had on her life. She refers to it as “the power of strangers,” meaning that it is entirely dependent on people you never know or will know, collectively working to make a massive contribution to her fight and the fight of others. People who yearly donate, run, ride, and (of course) hold yard sales in tribute to those fighting the good fight. Any way you slice it, it’s an amazing deployment of the power of the human spirit.

This weekend on May 26^th hundreds of people in communities across Canada will hold yard sales and donate some or all of the proceeds to the cause. Thousands will shop them. Thousands more will shop the many community sales being hosted by 1-800-Got-Junk and ReMax, the charity’s national sponsors. It’s our hope that the proceeds from this year’s Yard Sale for the Cure will eclipse 1.2 million dollars – that’s 1.2 million more steps towards ensuring that our daughters never have to hear the words “you have breast cancer.”

Yard Sale for the Cure is the only pro bono account we have at Grip. That is a very deliberate decision on our part. We do it because we believe in it and have been personally connected to it since the beginning. It’s that simple. I have been known to be critical of how this approach is not shared by many in our industry. In retrospect, that may not be entirely fair; at the end of the day, for whatever reason, there are still many who willingly donate their time, effort, resources and extensive knowledge to worthy causes that may not otherwise be able to afford those services. As an industry, we’re pretty good that way. Whatever the motive, at the end of the day, good people benefit.

Good people like Rachael.

So keep doing your bit, or start doing your bit. Remind yourself of the power of the industry you’re in. And while you’re at it, remind yourself of the kind of change you wanted to make when you got into this business in the first place.

There are some questions that are so pressing – so fundamentally burning – they can no longer be ignored. In this, the Big Orange Slide’s latest series, we ask Grippers of all stripes to weigh in on one such question.

Share your own response in the comments section. It’ll be like our own personal round of “the more we get together” — but for advertising.

This week we ask: “Why did YOU get into advertising?”

“…It was either this or Marine Biology.”
- Bob Shanks, Managing Partner

“I needed a career that didn’t require me to wear a suit.  It’s true.”
- Randy Stein, Partner, Creative

“The founder of my university newspaper read a column I wrote and, while drunk, told me ‘You should go into advertising.’ I was drunk, and I dismissed him at the time. But 3 years later I (still drunk) decided maybe he was on to something.”
- Warren Haas, Copywriter

“It was the big time. It was exciting. It was fresh. It was a heck of a lot better than working at the local desktop publisher, getting drunk down at the pool hall with the locals, and living in my parent’s basement for the rest of my life.”
- AJ Quinlan, Print Producer

“I love sociology and human behaviour but realized I didn’t want to be a social worker. I deeply admire and respect creativity but realized I myself am not ‘an artist’. I’ve always been a very responsible, logical thinker who has a pretty good business sense…
So I guess when you merge all those things together you get an advertising account person :)”
- Michelle Czyzewski, Director, Business

“Bewitched! I watched reruns of Bewitched as a kid during the summers. After seeing how Darrin Stephens worked on ad ideas and how to influence people I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
- Steven Hudak, PHP Developer

“I get paid to be on Facebook. It’s not as glorious as it sounds. Okay, it is.”
- Patrick Tomasso, Community Engagement Manager

“Lots of different skills sets coming together into a creative fun force.”
- Lana Pawziuk, Manager, Business (Interactive)

“Completely by accident. My job on the client side was moving from Toronto to Montreal. I didn’t want to move, so my agency hired me. That was 11 years ago and I have loved it ever since.”
- Grace Debrabandere, Associate Partner, Business