don't know nothing

See this graphic? I don't know what it means. I don't know what it's trying to illustrate. I don't know what sort of idea it is attempting to explain in simple, easy-to-understand pictures. I just Googled "marketing" and this came up. And that, my friend, pretty much sums up "marketing."

When I'm not drawing pictures of dead people or visiting cemeteries or watching fifty-year-old TV shows or shitting all over Ringo on the internet, I go to an actual job. I work for a large commercial printer that produces thousands upon thousands of circulars for supermarkets and other customer-friendly retail businesses up and down the east coast. I work in a small office with a dozen other graphic designers who, on a daily basis, toil over the whims and nonsensical ideas of any number of individual store owners or "marketing experts" with "a vison." That "vison" translates to every single circular looking exactly the same week after week after week. Despite this, every so often, a completely composed circular is disrupted just hours before it gets sent to press by some yutz with a "brand new idea." Understand that these stores are selling canned vegetables and paper towels and frozen chickens. The same products are included week after week. But, still, they want things to STAND OUT and GET NOTICED. They use phrases like BIG PUSH and BLOWOUT SALE and other meaningless jargon. A circular that should take a few hours to compose, ends up being stretched over several days because someone binge-watched Mad Men this weekend and fancies themselves the Don Draper of the grocery world.

I've been doing this, in one capacity or another, for over forty years. I've seen it all... and most of it has been bullshit. Sure, I have met and worked with genuine "marketing" professionals. These are people with legitimately clever and innovative ideas that have the potential to motivate and inspire customers. But, for the most part, true "marketers" are harder to find than a kosher ham sandwich or an honest politician. Instead the World of Marketing (sounds like a theme park) is filled with spineless, wishy-washy dishrags with no real ideas. I can't figure out how these people (and I have met dozens of them) are able to advance themselves to positions of authority. They get to a corporate level where final decisions are placed in their hands, yet they never want to commit, fearing a wrong decision will result in a dressing down from their boss. Instead, they shoot out monosyllabic emails that read: "Thoughts?," then sit back and wait for their underlings to come up with something. If submitted ideas are good, they will take the credit under the guise of "team leader." If a bad idea is chosen, they are the first ones to point their finger at the source. I saw this practice for the dozen years I worked in the marketing department of a large law firm. I never saw so many useless, lazy people with no original ideas. They just spewed buzz words and asked for "infographics" or some other new trend they just read about in a marketing publication. 

Once I traded in my "business casual" for the "down-and-dirty" world of pre-press (a big room of artists churning out quickly-composed ads for huge print runs. Google it, if you really care), I thought I'd never have to deal with that corporate mumbo-jumbo again.

I was wrong.

One of the companies I create circulars for on a weekly basis is a chain of supermarkets based in New York. They are a family-owned business, with ten stores located in affluent areas of Long Island. I deal with a young lady who is experiencing her first job right out of college. Here, she is able to apply her useless marketing degree for the sole purpose of selling an extra pound of strawberries – just by adding a big red "burst" that says "SWEET!" on top of the picture. My entire interaction with her (and everyone at this company) is via the internet through a collaboration website called Ziflow. All communication is through messaging on this website. Considering that I get the bulk of my instructions from her, she is an inarticulate communicator. She has a very difficult time explaining exactly what it is that she wants. Plus, her spelling is atrocious. Sometimes I have to stare at and reread messages several times before I can understand what I am supposed to do. She has no concept of proportion and sizing, however she uses terms like "lower the opacity" regularly. Oh, when she says "lower the opacity," she really means increase the opacity. But, after three years of doing these circulars, I have come to understand and interpret what is required.

Just this week, while working on this week's circular for this particular supermarket, I started getting messages from someone named "Norman" – a name I had not seen before. Norman instructed me to add a burst here that says "Great For Your Family!" Another message changed a headline that read "CATERING" to "Check Out Our Catering!" The next message asked for my thoughts on – and I quote – "reconfiguring the front page into a graphicly-pleasing hierarchy"... or some such third-year marketing bullshit. I merely replied that my job is to follow the layout with which I am provided. Surprisingly, he didn't press the issue.

I make no design suggestions. Zero. Zilch. Although I have been a graphic designer for over four decades, my role in my current job is not that of a designer. I am a layout artist – pure and simple. I do what I am told by the customer. I do not embellish, nor do I make any suggestions. I was told by my boss on Day One that we, essentially, produce trash. The circulars that we create have a shelf life of one week and are never ever looked at again. In that one week, they are just glanced at by the consumer. The target audience is someone looking for a good price on a box of Cap'n Crunch or a family pack of pork chops. We are not producing great works of art. We produce easy to understand presentations of everyday grocery items. If the consumer wants to see the Mona Lisa, they can go to the fucking Louvre. They are never gonna find it in a supermarket circular.... no matter what a store owner wants.

I Googled "Norman" and discovered that he has recently been hired by this chain of supermarkets with the title of "Merchandising Director" or something corporate-sounding like that. His job description is a run-on sentence of some of the thickest bullshit I have ever laid eyes upon. Immediately, I had flashbacks to my time stuck in marketing meetings at the law firm and watching a bunch of idiots with marketing degrees pat each other on the back while bandying about phrases like "low-hanging fruit" and "vertical juxtaposition" and "let's table that offline, but not until this afternoon, because I'll be out of pocket until 1 o'clock"... whatever that means. Norman, I quickly surmised, was a corporate asshole. And he proved me right after instructing me to add a big red burst to a picture of cherries that screamed "More Fruit, Less Pit!" His next decision was to make sure the words "Veggie Mac Salad" appear on one line, even though those words appeared on two lines in a featured block of various deli salads for over a year. Once I adjusted the size of the text to get "veggie" to drop down to the next line, Norman went home to tell his family that he made a crucial corporate decision at work today that will net the company untold profits. Later the same day, he indicated several places where he wanted the word "WOW!" to appear in a big red burst.

When Monday rolls around, I will be treated to another barrage of Norman's genius. Noman will pose passive-aggressive scenarios regarding whether a headline should say "Meat Sale" or "Sale on Meat." Norman will wait until an hour before press deadline to rearrange the placement of wedges of cheese or to question the height of a dollar sign.

To borrow a line from Ursula, the Sea Witch: "It's what I live for."

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