"Daddy, what do you do?" asks my 7 yr. old. "I work," is my standard reply. Generally without skipping a beat in the four or five IMs I got going with the Vampires. Unfortunately, this answer hasn't been working out for me lately. This is a problem because more and more people, somewhat taller than my 7 yr old have the bad manners to ask me this question, over and over again.

A well-tuned snarl (literally not figuratively) will usually suffice. But lately, not so much. There's no respect any more. So here it is. In my ongoing attempt to provide clarity in the face of massive uncertainty, here is what it takes to actively seek the Reinvention of Advertising each and every day, as the rest of you are going about your lives as rational, human beans.

Advertising matters. It defines the world of "new" for billions of people around the word. We need to know what's new. However we no longer need advertising to satisfy our need to know. I see this as a problem. I work in advertising. If it's broken, I damn sure better try and fix it. I don't understand why everybody doesn't feel that way. But they don't.

So this is not an easy job. Reinventing Advertising is hard work. That's not a complaint. That's just one of the facts of life I signed on for.

So every morning at 6am PST I start my day. I read the trades and restrain myself from spending any time devising comments with which to respond to the various samples of myopic, misinformed or just plain muddled thinking that passes for editorial coverage of this crisis-ridden $800 billion global business practice. A business practice that I set about to redefine almost four years ago when A.G. Lafely the CEO of P&G claimed it was "broken."

When I read about Mr. Lafely's indictment of the marketing model that had served global enterprise for more than 100 years, the klaxons went off in my head and I blew general quarters to myself and my staff. I thought everybody in advertising would be doing the same drill, since this statement was made at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference at the Greenbrier. All the agency brass hats were there. It wasn't like they didn't know their largest client was pissed at their performance of late.

But to my dismay, nothing happened. And four years later nothing has still happened to fix what is broken in the advertising industry. But in four years the clients have moved on. Both P&G and Coca-Cola have announced revising their compensation plans to be based upon "performance" rather than just showing up with the boards. The Audience has moved on and media is in a tailspin of Biblical proportions as a result.

And industry leadership is not existent. And according to a recent poll the American public is blaming the "advertising agencies" for   the current economic meltdown, because they "enticed" Americans to go out and buy a lot of stuff they couldn't afford. And all Nancy Hill can come up with after the 4A's Leadership Conference, is that "adverbloggers" are stuck in doomsday mode.

Pitiful.

So, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go every morning. Doing what little that I and my rag-tag band of merry brainiacs, hackers, code warriors, outcasts, misfits, interns and other assorted vampires can to restage the way advertising works. All told there are more or less 22 people working in eight time zones to advance the work of IAPIA both night and day. Nobody is getting paid. Not even some people's landlords. My days and nights are spent moving from project to project trying to determine what, if any progress is being made and if not, why not. We are currently in the stage of quantifying our second generation prototype for NeoAdNet1.0. That means asking, interviewing, calculating, projecting all of the degrees of engagement, interest, retention, persuasion and response associated with the eight testing sessions conducted thus far. Some of this work is really interesting and exciting. Some of it is dull as dishwater. Literally counting click paths and calculating page views.

But mainly it's holding conversations about what advertising means, what advertising represents and what advertising stands for. It is disheartening to find as we go forward in time, that what we do for a living matters less and less to the audience we are trying to influence. It used to be that advertising was just a nuisance. An unwanted interruption. A necessary evil. Now advertising is a non-entity. A doesn't matter. A zero interest topic not even worthy of comment. That's what the thousands of questionnaires we have college students passing out and filling in all over the country for extra credit are telling us. More and more confirmation of Mr. Lafely's observation of dysfunction at the root.

So we try, as best we can to spend each day pealing away another level of traditional advertising's onion skin to see how deep the rot has driven. And then we do our best to come up with alternatives that we can quantify as more effective or more efficient. Conversations, debates, arguments, knock-down drag outs, epiphanies, revelations, disappointments heartbreaks and assorted laughs along the way. And then somebody in a darkened loft in downtown LA pushes a few key strokes, the cloud servers at Rackspace light up and 20 new websites join the NeoAdvertising network Platform and the process begins anew. A college coder kid in Kiev proposes a cybertoast and we all hoist an imaginary glass of two buck chuck, chug it down and its BTW. That is how my day progresses long into the night.

Recently, IAPIA has been awarding fellowships to advertising practitioners in the creative fields.   These adventurous Creative Directors, Writers and Art Directors come out to Los Angeles and spend an intense week of brain busting with our various IAPIA development teams. They are given assignments as if they were in a portfolio school, but with one key difference. They cannot use any standard tool of the ad trade to express their concept or campaign. No print ads, no TV spots. No billboards.

Only elements that exist in the real world can be utilized as media. Only actions that actively engage the audience as meaningful experiences can be used as messaging vehicles. The efforts of the first four IAPIA Fellows was presented last Friday.

They were very impressive to say the least.

This week our Fellows are all back at their respective agency desks. Principles of NeoAdvertising firmly implanted in their mental arsenal.

So at the end of the day I can crack a crooked smile. The work of Reinventing Advertising has four more willing converts, implanted and committed to spreading the gospel in everything they do from this point on. And next month another four will be on their way West. Slowly but surely, the interest out there is rising. At least that's what I tell myself as I doze off in my chair as the approach to 3am draws near and the IM messages ping across time zones where another workday has already begun. Perhaps I will press on. Perhaps I'll give it at least one more day.