References Available Upon Request.

Have dumber words ever been written? I see this on resumes all the time. I think, “no shoeshine, Sherlock.” If your references aren’t available, neither is the job.

(I don’t actually think “shoeshine,” but this is a family website.)

If you’re looking for the painfully obvious on your resume, why not, “will show up for work if hired”?

Many of the objectives I see on resumes are similarly over-ripe. I’ve seen some that say, essentially, “seeking a job with your company.” You dedicated space at the top of your resume for that? If I’m too dense to figure that out when you send your application, you don’t want to work with me.

Here’s another resume rip-snorter:  prosaic jobs coached up on paper to sound like brain surgery. Applications for internships from college students with no professional experience are the most fun. A student who worked as a waiter killed thousands of electrons with this entry:

Liaisoned with kitchen staff to maximize customer experience.
Interfaced with diners to expedite meal delivery and eliminate errors.
Coordinated multiple orders simultaneously.

And so on like that, Adobe emailed and demanded that I return Acrobat. I wanted to tell the applicant her resume would only work were I a moron, but of course, I never called her.

Nor have I called the “functional resume” fundamentalists who list their skills (Word Perfect, great!) ad nauseum, but neglect to mention where they’ve actually worked and when. I agree that accomplishments are more important than experience, but nouns can be validated more easily than adjectives and verbs.

I’ve always thought  a good rule of thumb on resume construction is: try not to look like a dolt. No phony objectives, no transparent hyperbole, no empty proclamations.

Facts are good, though. I like facts.

barry waldman

What do you get when you combine a six-foot three-inch membership chair with a longtime Skirt! rep? You may find out in a coming issue.

I don’t know if most of the men who appear in Skirt! lobby the magazine for the right to pose in women’s wear, but Ted deLoach did. Without the least evocation of irony, he campaigned Jenny Dennis at a recent AMA event. (That’s Ted on the right.)

And it’s clear that he’s already contemplated his ensemble for the blessed event, which I am prohibited by FCC law and the revocation of my man card from detailing. Let’s just say it’s a saucy selection that will require just the right shoes.

If the sight of Ted’s legs in full color at 600 dpi shivers your timbers, consider instead the power of AMA networking. A stray word to the right person during a Charleston Crab House happy hour can lead to permanent personal infamy, not to mention dozens of canceled subscriptions. (Does Skirt! even have subscriptions? Well heck, let’s not let facts get in our way here.) Imagine what a well-placed conversation might yield.

So if you pick up a Skirt! in the next few months and find your eyes have fused to the inside of your eyelids, don’t say you weren’t warned. There’s no gams test for the American Marketing Association.

barry waldman

I always called it the Condom Effect — it’s something you hate, but have to use.  (Although, given my dating history, it wasn’t such an imperative. In my world, charm is a quark.)

Chris Mumford of The Martin Agency had a slightly different way of expressing it. Mumford and his crew from Richmond, Va.  produce advertising for a company called GEICO. Perhaps you’ve seen his work?

“Mashed potatoes!” “Does it really take two to tango?” “So easy a caveman can do it.”

Mumford reported at the AMA luncheon August 4th, that the driving philosophy behind GEICO’s multi-inspirational ad campaigns is that car insurance, in his lyrical homage reminiscent of the poetry of Whitman, “sucks.” Transforming the house brand of government employees to a national insurer required, again in his words, breaking conventions.

The resulting drollery is hardly about insurance, and it’s packaged into an unprecedented four or five simultaneous ad campaigns.  Nonetheless, it’s instructive to note that the ads still hew to basic marketing principles.  They never stray from their narrow focus on saving a quick buck and they always revolve around the now-familiar 15 minute/15 percent intonation.

The laws of marketing are reacting predictably, which is to say the results have been unpredictable. One of the sharpest campaigns flopped, according to Mumford, while the the single unfunny (my humble opinion here) campaign nailed the early Recession zeitgeist and delivered new policies for the company. The former, the celebrity spokesperson routine, fell victim to over-cleverness. Viewers were so enamored with the celebrities that the regular Joe message of savings and good service was completely lost. The latter, the googly-eyed pile of cash, may not have elicited a chuckle, but it visually reinforced the money-saving meme.

It’s a reminder to all of us that sometimes, even when cleverness is the coin of the realm, you can be too clever by half if the consumer of your creativity isn’t along for the ride. (See my sub-atomic particle reference in the first paragraph.)

The competition, of course, has caught on. Nationwide is attempting to annoy us into submission with the smarmy spokesjoker. State Farm has gone the American Idol route with a focus on great service. Allstate’s Mayhem spots are maniacally brilliant because they entertain while  peddling that old insurance boogeyman — fear. They even take an oblique crack at GEICO.

Mumford reports that they’re all spinning their wheels. Though State Farm and Allstate still dominate the market, GEICO continues to make inroads. But as we cynics understand intuitively, above every silver lining, there’s a cloud.

Progressive Insurance  has demonstrated some marketing moxie since being supplanted by GEICO as the #3 auto insurer. Anchored by Flo the throwback spokesperson, Progressive has one-upped GEICO with its rate checker and most recently, with a device that tracks your driving habits and reports you to the cops. No! I mean, it determines that you might not be the average cretin who thinks he can operate a dangerous vehicle while Tweeting “on my way to Yo Burrito for lunch with Brittany” on his smartphone, and restructures your rate. Whether this catches on and propels Progressive higher remains to be seen.

In the end, GEICO hasn’t changed auto insurance so much as it’s changed TV advertising, and that’s a feather in the cap of Mumford and his mates. We no longer expect industries hawking morbidity to eschew levity, edginess or even sarcasm.

Hey, the world might just be ready for my long-incubating United Way campaign slogan: “Just give us your damn money!”

–barry waldman