Day 196

It's hard to get excited about a day where the market dropped 268 points, the phone didn't ring, and the dogs used yesterday's rain as an opportunity to track mud through the house. Slow, rainy days like this would be a good time to start a new book or go to a movie. I didn't feel like driving anywhere though. Instead, I watched CNBC all day and let the dismal market news drag me down while I puttered around the house.

I've been trying to reorganize my portfolio to appeal to a broader audience. Right now, most of my clients are veterinarians. A few years ago most of my customers were in the oil and gas industry. Before that, it was all high-tech. I need to keep reminding myself that when I initially started my company, I was doing network television commercials for companies like Pepsi and Mountain Dew. How did I slide from shooting big budget soft drink commercials to writing inexpensive brochures for veterinarians? I don't think I did anything wrong. I just tried to stay in business while the world kept changing around me.

I talked to a friend who is still in the agency business recently. He said he thought the traditional advertising agency was a dinosaur that couldn't last much longer. He was hoping his own agency would last another five years. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for advertising anymore. Why should they? Instead of sending an expensive creative team to Los Angeles for two weeks to put together their next commercial, they can accomplish more or less the same thing by sending somebody to Starbucks for the afternoon with a laptop and some good editing software.

At least I'm not in the newspaper business. When I was a kid, I remember going on a school field trip to the local newspaper plant. We watched as Linotype operators melted lead in huge machines to make the type that would be used to print the evening paper. Hundreds of people with specialized skills used to  be needed to put together a newspaper. I wonder what happened to all of them? Most of their jobs don't even exist anymore. Pretty soon, the newspaper itself won't even exist anymore.

So here I am, sitting at the edge of the blogosphere, wondering what comes next. My sister says I ought to concentrate on writing more dog stories, because people love books like Marley and Me. My friend Alan says my blog would have more readers and I could be the next William Wegman if I did humorous videos of Dalmatians, instead of just having a single still picture each day. Janet says if I would bust my ass and work harder, the rest would take care of itself. Probably everybody is right, but I still wish the rain would stop and the market would go up.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day