Mark Fenske was one of the most extraordinary creative people I have ever known. He did not suffer fools lightly. Come to think of it, he didn’t suffer them at all. Ever. At some point, after a career that included brilliant work for Nike, Coca-Cola and Levi’s, he found his way to VCU Brandcenter in Richmond where the most fortunate students of advertising in all the land got to soak up his wisdom. (Even though he made them read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” at orientation and started them all off with an F grade right out of the box). Last I knew, he wasn’t teaching anymore and what a shitty blow that has to be for all those young mush-for-brains kids who will never be on the receiving end of the world as Fenske knows it. What he’s doing now, I have no idea. Fishing maybe. Writing novels. Painting birds. Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve heard he’s reading a lot. And that’s great. But I miss him. We all do even if we don’t know it.
A lot of people are spending a lot of time these days trying to get all clairvoyant on us. Trying to predict whether advertising will zig or zag. This one says print is over. That one says TV has one foot in the grave. Movie theaters will soon be as relevant as the Parthenon. The human eyeball will gradually evolve into something approaching the size of a pea thanks to all those hours spent squinting at that weenie, little iPhone screen. Edgar Cayce, we hardly knew ye.
As for me, well, I haven’t a clue where all of this is going. Sure, I have a theory or two, though I don’t know what’s going to happen. But let me tell you, I know what I’d like to see happen. Of course, the technology doesn’t exist yet, but it will. And when it does, I know exactly what I’d like to do with it. Because no matter what twists and turns await us in the future, doing this one thing could solve a lot of problems.
I’m talking about Mark Fenske’s brain.
That’s right. I want to upload Mark Fenske’s gray matter into a computer. Every thought he’s ever had. Every insight. Every pearl of gritty and authentic wisdom. Just hook a bunch of electrodes up to the guy’s noggin and suck it all up. All that cool thinking. All the stuff that the little twerps at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Brandcenter got to hear about and most of us never will. Just upload Fenske’s brain and make it available to creatives for as far into the future as the eye can see and then some
I’m going to just say this: For as long as I can remember, Mark has been one of the few guys in this business who genuinely got it. That there’s something fundamentally deeper to all this stuff. That if a client from a neighboring star system came down here to conduct a review, well, she’d probably be pretty disappointed with the shallowness. The lack of deep insight. The absence of thought. The ready willingness to throw substance to the sharks. The mindlessness of it all. Fenske has no patience for it. He never did. So for a while, he went to a classroom in Richmond and he talked, and he provoked, and he stirred the pot.
“Our brain’s default position in every situation we face is to angle for the way that gives the most comfort, or is the most efficient, or hippest or cheapest.
“The brain is rational. The brain aims to keep the status quo until something more comfortable comes along. The brain needs tricking. To create at a high level you must trick your rational brain into sitting down and letting the rest of the gray matter work. In your quest to make interesting work, you must not choose the comfortable way. You must not do what is efficient or logical or what satisfies someone sitting next to you. You must overrule your brain. You must march out into the field you don’t know.”
And he stirred... “To write advertising—maybe to write anything—you must be coming from where the audience comes from. Who doesn’t know the agony of having to listen to someone talk who thinks they’re more important than you are. “To attract, hold and be loved by an audience, you must be preoccupied with what preoccupies them.”
And he stirred...
“It takes magic, ludicrous, fancy, blind-flying and something hidden from probably 99.7% of the people on earth to bring an audience what they don’t know. It takes Mr. Wacko. A willingness to love what it makes no sense to. A penchant, sometimes, for turning an exact circle away from what everybody around you says is true and going in the opposite direction. These are crucial willingnesses, not something you can allow yourself to be afraid of or talked out of by the normal people around you.”
And still he stirred...
“This is me. A Michigan-football-watching, deep-fried-turkey-eating, flannel-shirt-is-a-coat man of the prairie. A barn-sized door-filler from the offensive tackle-producing breadbasket of the country. The kind of guy who wants another turkey on the BBQ while the first one is in the deep fryer. Just in case. When I sit down to write, beer and sausage is what flows in my head. If I try not to be who I am, if I try to be someone cooler or slimmer or better dressed, am I going to be able to feed the pen that sits at the end of my hand waiting for ideas? There’ll be nothing. Nothing human or new anyway. There’ll just be that nasty-faced bugaboo that doesn’t like me like I am, staring back at me with an empty expression that says, ‘Go find something to say from somewhere else, buddy, ’cause what you got in here we don’t like.’”
If you know nothing about Fenske, do yourself a favor. Read his 14 Anti-Laws Of Advertising. Copy and paste. Tape it up somewhere so it slaps you across the face every day.
Nobody ever did a good ad by writing to a strategy. When your gut tells you you've got something that touches you, then write the strategy.
The companies that do the most advertising are the ones that believe in advertising the least.
We are not salesmen, we are craftsmen of what may be the most powerful art form on earth. I can look at a Rauschenberg and say, "Well, that's interesting and I do get a feeling from it, but I'm not sure how it relates to me." But with advertising, you know what it's about.
A good ad has no discernible strategy. Recently, a critic said about the Nissan campaign: "Where's the strategy?" That shows a lack of understanding of how advertising works.
The worst person to present creative work to a client is the creative who did it. When you go in to present your own ideas to a client, the client doesn't see you as a writer or art director -- he sees a car salesman. Get the president of your agency to present your work. Don't go to the meetings.
The consumer isn't just smart, he's a genius. Even clients get it. Clients are human beings until they walk into a marketing meeting.
Imitation is not flattery.
A reasoning mind can be your greatest enemy. A reasoning mind seeks to arrive at an answer by ruling out opinions until there is only one left, and that is the answer. The problem is that you end up with the same answer that everyone else has already thought of. The audience will respond to it as they would to a joke whose punchline they already know. You cannot "logic" your way into someone's heart.
Skip the plant tour. Stay as ignorant as the audience. Otherwise you'll be as useless as the client. Clients know too much about their own products to be able to write a good ad; all they can do is shill. When you know too much you always have the answer. You sound like an infomercial.
There's not that much difference between a creative person at Wieden & Kennedy and one at Ayer. I've been in both places. There's not that much difference in the way people think.
Clients don't hate good work. However, there are only two times in a product's life cycle when clients buy great work. Right at the beginning, when they don't know anything yet. And right at the end, when the product can see its own reflection in the toilet bowl.
The longer you work for a client, the harder it gets. Of all the reasons to admire Wieden & Kennedy and their work for Nike, I'll bet the least understood is how difficult it is to still be doing it at such a high level after 10 years. Imagine the terror involved when Jim Riswold has to sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper and try to top everything he's done before.
The most difficult job in advertising is not writing ads, it's buying them. Nothing I've ever done has taught me this more than hiring an architect to build a house. Suddenly, I'm the client. Suddenly, I'm being presented to. Suddenly, I have to look at sketches to try to figure out what I'm being sold -- with no idea of what the finished product will look like.
Do not learn to compromise. If someone who matters doesn't like what you do, drop it. Do something else. Don't change a thing. Don't become a swerver.
Somewhere, someday in some ad school of the far future, a bunch of students are going to be sitting in a holodeck classroom watching some guy trying to show them the secret to great work.
Hologram or not, for their sake, I hope it’s Fenske.
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This is great, Ernie. A service to the industry. All hail to Fenske!
I've worked with Mark on a number of assignments. What always amazed me about his point of view, was his entry point to an ad. It wasn't formulaic in anyway. You could not imagine a similar headline or copy. Yet it stuck you in such a compelling way. And you appreciated the fact that it spoke to you in a way you didn't see coming a mile away. One assignment was for Lincoln, and the introduction of a of a luxury truck called the Lincoln Blackwood. It was one of those trucks that made you wonder, who drives this? We did a couple of ads for it. Mark's lines were: You Don't Explain It. It Explains You. And: Nobody Will Know What You Do, Everyone Will Wonder. Those thoughts are not coming from the manufacturer, they are coming from inside me, the consumer. Or for Aspen. If you are a skier, at some point, you have to make it to Aspen. His thought, over just the image of the mountain: Has A Religion Ever Convinced You As Certainly. Or for a new desktop computer from Sony that allowed you to draw on the screen: Normal People Don't Need This, But It's Here, if You're A Bit Extraordinary. To compel someone to stop and recognize that I haven't seen anything for other products within the same category, expressed quite that way, is very tough to do, unless you come from a place that Mark does, refusing to adopt the formulas of speaking that are replicated by so many other creative teams. Whenever I worked with Mark, I anticipated that how he would express an idea or a thought, would not be like any other creative I had worked with. And that was an exciting experience.