It is loaded with references to acronyms like the terms above, some of which I understand, but 90 per cent of this stuff is absolutely beyond me. It has been sitting on my desk for a week. I have been avoiding it like the plague. I called the agency for a translation of all these terms. I was smugly advised that an RFP is a request for proposal, a Q4 2000 is a quote for the year
2000, FH means first half of 2001 and so on for the rest of this silly verbal ga ga.
I have long gotten past any concern that I may seem too dumb to grasp today' s slang references in the big deal ad agency world, but golly, I am weary of these people who insist on using them. I would love to say to these people: “Can we just talk? Or do we have to compete with each other in the use of buzz words and acronyms?”
But sarcasm is just hurtful. And I don't want to be that way. So I just say that I did not realize that when you asked for RHPBJ, you meant right hand page, for bulletins and journals. I mistakenly filled in some information about the right-handed pitching staff of the Blue Jays. I thought you were asking about baseball.
Why can't we just talk about our readership, and then decide if it's worth the money to advertise? I love to talk about REM and its readers. I love to tell people who are not familiar with the real estate world, that its practitioners are unique people. They are entrepreneurial in spirit. They are passionate about their craft. They have an honourable profession with specific needs that may just be ideal for specific products and services.
They are not a numeric focus group or demographic chart. Let's talk about the real estate profession. Give me five minutes and I will tell you about this important and interesting community of business people. I can't tell you about them in this friggin' RFP form you sent me.
I am sure we all have frustrations like this. It must be like having a client who demands to know all the mechanics of a house, right down to the diameter of the water pipes, who will only compare these statistics before they even look at a property.
Clients like that will probably end up with a very mechanically sound property. But they will completely miss the ambiance of a neighbourhood, the beauty of a backyard view or the treasures that can be found by a river and surrounding park that might be just steps away from a house that will never be seen — because the mechanicals aren't right.
When I look back, I realize that I have spent most of my working life around newspapers, marketing promotions and advertising campaigns. There was a time when this environment sizzled with creativity, and was alive with new ideas. But a lot of that has been replaced with statistics and formula writing.
It seems to me that the last profession left today that has any need for creative thought, fresh approaches, and innovative skills, is real estate. It is the last bastion of dreams that are described in plain language, where potential is discussed in pleasant conversations, over coffee. Discussions that are brimming with ideas and imagination. Who wants to sit at a desk and crunch numbers about focus groups and demographic trends that may reflect the buying habits of a defined portion of our marketing targets? Yikes!
Give me a kitchen table where I can have a meaningful conversation about hopes, dreams, good music, winter breezes, fall colours, children's artwork, a Christmas morning, summer rain and everything else that can't be measured but still has value that can only be defined in imagination and the spoken word.
If I have to work on a newspaper, thank heavens that at least I get to work with Realtors every day. And that's the plain truth.
Heino Molls is the publisher of REM.
