George Tannenbaum / Joseph Mitchell & Robert Caro
George Tannenbaum is one of the few remaining old school New York ad men.
He’s a real been-there-done-that guy. His journey began in 1984 at Lowe & Partners before moving on to just about every agency in town working on just about every type of business imaginable. Computers, computer chips, cars, credit cards. All the Cs it seems. He no doubt worked Cap’n Crunch, Coca Cola and Colgate, too, based on his alphabetical expertise.
I always feel a sense of embarrassment when someone mentions a big influence and I’ve never heard of them. I quickly make a mental note of the name. Must look up later. This was certainly the case for George’s two nominations to our discussion.
Robert Caro, George reliably informed me, is well known across America, or by the scholarly types across Europe. I had never heard of him, but then I have never claimed to be scholarly.
And Joseph Mitchell was a writer for the New Yorker. Also dead famous, apparently. But then, I spent my teenage years giggling to myself reading Zoo magazine rather than cultural articles from across the pond.
George, himself, is a very well read man who throughout our chat cited numerous references from the worlds of poetry, music, art, film and, of course, advertising.
He is passionate about his job. That much is clear.
His sentences, like those of many passionate people I have met, live in permanent crescendo.
A small point, like a single piano key, starts the symphony of conversation and we move through the octaves and decibels, introducing instruments of unarguable logic and examples before arriving at the cymbal crash of “And who the fuck wants to buy from a brand like that?”. He’s all I hoped and imagined a modern day New York copywriter would be.
So, who are these people that have nothing to do with advertising then and how does George use them to his advantage?
Caro is an American writer. He started life as a journalist, but his intrigue and passion for his topics took his career into writing biographies instead. A career where he could spend as much time as he needed on a topic and not have the looming deadline of the printers over his head to make the news stands by the next morning.
As George put it, “What he does under the guise of biography is he examines power, how it’s acquired and how it’s used.” His most famous books are the biographies of American public official, Robert Moses and former US President, Lyndon B Johnson.
Caro was told by a college professor to he would never achieve what he wanted to unless he learnt to stop thinking with his fingers. This backwards compliment showed admiration for Caro’s writing - he was a fast writer and could make a story flow - but, he was focused on the words, not on the content. In his own words, he had to think things through.
If you go to George’s Twitter page you will see his own mantra, cut from the same cloth.
Good thinking is good writing.
George told me how he finds the sound of his writing important. Euphony, the way the words link, the sentence forms, the flow of language to the ear, is all key. But he would happily sacrifice euphony for truth and meaningful content. Tell the truth simply over nice words that hold little meaning.
Caro once found himself in a room full of documents, records, and papers about Lyndon B Johnson while doing research. He said to his editor that he had no clue what he was looking at. And his editor’s words back were simple…
“Turn every page.”
George does just this. He makes it his job to turn every page of the product he’s working on. It’s about finding the thing that makes your product your product. And that could be the way it’s made, the way it’s packaged, the smell, the flavour, the origin, the owner. It could literally be anything. It’s George’s mission at the beginning of every brief to diligently work his way through his own mental room of documents to find that little nugget on which he can rest his hat.
This ethos of research does not mean ending with an ad that goes into excessive detail on every aspect of a product. It boils down to finding the interesting point of difference in your product. And he’s not going to sit around and wait for anyone else to do this job for him. He believes it’s the job of the writer to find what it they’re going to write about.
“Most people don’t know what most products do or why they’re different”. Enter George.
He summed up his next candidate of conversation, Joseph Mitchell, with one word. Empathy.
Mitchell was a writer for the New Yorker. Having never read any of his work, I asked George to describe his work to me. He said there was a love for people in his writing. A love for their human-ness. He made time to listen to people, however oddball they were.
According to the magazine themselves, he was given the a piece of advice from one of his first editors of the magazine to walk the city, get to know every side street and quirk and character.
And this is very much how Mitchell made a name for himself. He dived into his topics so deep that you would think he wouldn’t be able to breathe down there. His writing captured an era of New York City told through the characters that didn’t make the headlines. He profiled the Mohawk steelworkers, those behind the Manhattan skyline. He wrote about George Hunter, the caretaker of an African-American cemetery on Staten Island. And he told the tale of Lady Olga, the bearded lady who could be found in many a circus sideshow.
George contrasted Mitchell to American documentary film maker, Errol Morris, who, he said, would almost make fun of people in his films whereas Mitchell only had respect. As he said...
"We are all under the same covers."
This empathy has been lost in much modern work, though. The characters on our screens don’t feel like real people. The situations don’t feel like real situations.
If you can believe this, George has never unscrewed the cap of a bottle of drink and a spontaneous party erupted around him. He’s also never sprayed himself with deodorant and been bombarded by beautiful women wanting to sleep with him. What’s next George? Are you going to tell me you’ve never opened a sipped your coffee and instantly burst into a choreographed dance routine?
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“I’m 64. I’ve never got into a car and started singing.”
The true pitfalls and pains of life have vanished from our work and we find ourselves working in the world of dreams, rather than the realities.
The reality, though, as George is quick to point out, doesn’t test well. As he says “There’s never been a depiction of traffic in a modern American car commercial”. Instead, we try to make everyone smile by covering up truths with filler that gets the thumbs up in a test, “so everything we produce is skinny people smiling”.
No more Lemon. Just plenty of lemons singing and dancing.
George takes another leaf from Mitchell’s book. He respects his reader.
He doesn’t try to coerce feelings and emotion into the work where it is unjust, and often unnecessary. As he puts it, he gives them the information they need to make an intelligent decision on their own.
Simply put, it’s a case of finding what makes this product special and explaining it in a way that the reader understands. That’s not to say dumb it down. That’s to say, remember who you’re talking to.
A car’s engine has been designed by a team of incredibly gifted engineers but the technicalities don’t translate well to your Average Joe. What does resonate is faster, grippier, comfier, smoother, and so on.
When the whole world is dancing, desperately trying to be cool, fresh or modern, the real stand out would be an ad that creatively explains the truth. As George says, “Who has the time to look through reviews these days? It used to be easy to choose a product. You got an ad.”
Citing one of his other heroes, Bill Bernbach, George explained how good advertising is based on timeless human truths. Not fads, trends or tech.
He split the advertising industry into two tribes.
Group 1 - the people who think new technology is important
Group 2 - the people who think humans haven’t changed for 200,000 years.
He, unsurprisingly, places himself into Group 2.
Joseph Mitchell’s empathy shines in Group 2 because he explains that ideas from this group start with the people they’re talking to. Group 1 starts from a point of tech, trends, fads. And as such, will never reach the heart of anyone.
He gave the example how brands are constantly talking about how modern audiences want to be part of brands, be involved in the conversation. They say people want to lean in.
George’s response was short and sweet.
“No man, I’m tired. I don’t want to lean in. I want to lean back.”
We concluded our conversation with a question. What is a brand? He answered his own question.
“A brand is a promise.”
A shop might be filled with fifty types of soap, he said. And they all say different things.
The winner is the brand that makes the best promise to the right person. And that promise can only be made when the audience is understood and the product is understood.
“It’s not that hard. We made it hard when we became professionals.”
It was a pleasure to chat with George. He was charming, witty, informed and opinionated. And I’d recommend anyone to learn from his work.
But the sum of my conversation with George about Caro and Mitchell could be boiled down to these three key words.
People. Empathy. Truth.
Find George here: georgetannenbaum.com / adaged.blogspot.com / twitter.com/@georget20
Gartner Analyst - Chief Marketing Officer
2yLove this quote about brand, “It’s not that hard. We made it hard when we became professionals.”