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Eat Standing Up: Mexico City
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(Originally appeared in Heavy Table’s The Tap Newsletter, subscribe here.) Sit down restaurants are nice. I have nothing against sit down restaurants. But when checking out a new city, you don’t always want a time-consuming dining “experience” at every meal. Street food is freedom. Get served on the sidewalk. Eat…
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AI is Scary and 4 Other Reasons We Love It
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Getting real about Artificial Intelligence in the agency of the future Spoiler Alert: there’s a twist coming. But unlike every other article published about AI, it’s not that this was actually written by—gasp!—AI. No, this was written by me, a human, with human tendencies such as critical thinking and laughing…
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Hot Five: The Palm Springs Edition
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(Originally appeared in Heavy Table’s The Tap Newsletter, subscribe here.) Black Manhattan from Paul Bar/Food $16 You find yourself huddled with 30 or so strangers under the awning of an aging strip mall between a massage parlor and a vape shop staring at a locked door beneath a generic sign…
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Breaking: Ad Industry Collapses Under Weight of Its Own B.S.
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Tragic collapse of judgement destroys many of the industry’s brightest creative minds. MINNEAPOLIS, MN— In a fatal turn of events, the entire advertising industry was buried under an avalanche of its own bullshit after years of ignoring troubling infrastructure problems eroding away at its credibility. “It was a mountain of pure…
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5 Common Fetishes of the Advertising Professional
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We ad people aren’t exactly known for our quiet reserve and inhibition. We love a provocative idea. We’re open to trying new things. But not every whim is a good one. Here, I attempt to capture the most egregious fetishes—or fetish-like behaviors—I’ve observed in the business over the years. Maybe…
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The Infinite Possibilities of Thinking Inside the Box
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Why it’s OK to embrace boundaries In the ad business, there is no more thoughtlessly regurgitated cliché used to inspire creativity than “Think outside the box.” The implication is that the most creative ideas—those that break through, evoke emotion, and have real impact—all somehow live outside the box. The trouble…
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The (Lost) Art of Being a Great Client
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In advertising, we take almost maniacal pleasure in discovering great ideas. Like bizarro anthropologists, we obsessively hunt these ideas down and study them inside-and-out as though they’re artifacts from an alien world. We salute the insights and creative briefs that inspired them. What we rarely seem to acknowledge are the…
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Walk on Water
(Originally published in Stones Throw Magazine) The boy and the man—the boy’s stepfather—came every year when the ice was thick enough to hold them. “Let’s walk on water,” the man would say. And he’d grin at his own joke and reach out and give the boy’s hair a tousle. And…
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Swede Hollow Cafe in St. Paul, MN
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A large brass bell hangs from a leather strap at the top of the front door. Tacked behind it with clear packing tape is a pocket pack of tissue. It’s a ridiculously simple contraption. When you open the door the bell swings and smacks the tissue, ringing out a muffled ding and…
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Jerry Seinfeld is the Harbinger of the Alien Apocalypse
People of Earth: I am Jerry, representative of an advanced alien species that has come to enslave the human race and strip your planet of its meager resources leaving behind a decimated wasteland of human despair and suffering. If you do not do as we say, we will squash you…