It’s a real pleasure for me to be with you this evening, and a great honor to receive your “Distinguished Communicator Award” for 2006. Your institution is widely known and highly regarded as one of the best at what you do. I’ve personally been very impressed with the work of Dr. Nancy Snow—I’ve even been privileged to appear with her on a panel, and I am eagerly awaiting the publication of her forthcoming book, The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders are Doing Wrong and Why It’s Our Duty to Dissent, a subject that’s obviously of great interest to me.

I’m also impressed by the number of famous alums that line your “Wall of Fame” in your College Park building—I’m struck that you number Mark Cherry, creator of “Desperate Housewives,” and Kevin Costner among your distinguished alums. Also my friend Peggy Conlon, who is doing such important work as CEO of the Ad Council—generating $1 billion worth of contributed media time and space annually for more than 50 socially important causes. Peggy says Cal State Fullerton is the secret of any success she’s had and believe me, she’s had a lot. Her work is having enormous impact.

Your College of Communications is also important to DDB in some very specific ways. Rick Carpenter, who heads up DDB Los Angeles, got his advertising training here, as did some of our brightest creative and media professionals.

Unlike some of the previous winners of your Communicator of the Year Award, I’m sorry to say I am not an alum of Cal State Fullerton. In fact, I’m sorry to say I’m not an alum of any college or university. So while I’m truly honored to receive your award, I’m not quite sure why I was chosen. I must say I do like the sound of it—“Distinguished Communicator”—it’s so much better than those “lifetime achievement awards” one sometimes receives. Those, it always seems to me, suggest that your life is over, or at least your achievements are over. “Communicator of the Year” at least allows for the possibility that there might be something left. Even at my advancing age.

Although I still feel young. At least compared to that guy they interviewed not so long ago—you might have missed it with all the other headlines—the guy they interviewed on his 103rd birthday and when the reporter asked the old gentleman what was the single best thing about being 103 he said, without missing a beat, “No peer pressure.”

Given the advances of medical science, I suppose it’s possible that some of today’s Cal State Fullerton students will still be experiencing peer pressure when they’re 103. Which, in turn, means that you who are here tonight have an even longer lifetime of achievement ahead of you than we could ever have imagined. It’s exciting to think about what you might accomplish over the rest of the 21st century.

An overview of your College of Communications states a commitment to “advancing a democratic society by preparing students to function in a wide variety of communication professions.” I especially like the idea of advancing a democratic society.

The rest of the description that says “The academic programs of the College share a common theoretical base, which identifies the elements of human communication and the principles governing their use in all communicative processes essential to contemporary society, namely the spoken and written word and visual images.”

I’m sure those principles would include many that we have historically applied—the need to be relevant, the importance of originality and surprise, the power of music and humor and emotion.

But today’s communicators face a far more complicated communications landscape than the simpler field I entered some fifty years ago. In addition to the 106 television channels available to the average American, the 10,942 radio stations currently on the air and the more than 20,000 magazine and newspaper titles currently in print in the U.S., we live in a world of blackberrys and blogs—more than 38 million blogs so far, with more to come. There are other fundamental changes: Whereas we sent one-way messages of information and entertainment—“Let me entertain you, let me make you smile,” to borrow the line from Gypsy—today’s communicators more and more need to engage in dialogue with techno-savvy readers, listeners, viewers, visitors and even gamers, whose interactive response will be instant—for today, a better song than Gypsy’s is Jack Johnson’s “Better Together.”

While in the last century we were able to set the time and place of appointment with passive listeners and viewers, today we deal with a peripatetic target, people who may or may not want to engage with your message on their cell phone. The intended listener or viewer is often online while on the move, and always in complete control of when, where, how and whether to engage with a message. The communicator’s challenge is therefore more exciting than ever, to be so informative, so compelling, so entertaining and so engaging, that readers, listeners, viewers and visitors will choose to spend time with our messages, our entertainment and our brands.

As you take on these challenges, I have high hopes for you future communicators. In fact, I have a number of specific hopes.

I hope you will follow your passion. Nothing great has ever been accomplished without passion, said the German philosopher Hegel. And if you love what you do and do what you love, there is no reason you can’t achieve greatness. But even if greatness by the world’s definition should elude you, the passion of doing what you love is its own reward. Better to be a failure at something you love than a success at something you hate.

I hope you will perfect the art of looking and listening. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot, just by watching.” If you hope to evoke a response from readers, listeners, viewers and visitors, the art of studying them simply can’t be overemphasized. Be an inveterate people watcher, a voyeur even, and an eavesdropper. To make your message relevant, study what makes people laugh, or cry, what makes them tick. I’ve always liked what Wynton Marsalis has to say on relevance: “You can’t just be weird, man; people gotta dig it.”

I hope you will follow Ray Bradbury’s advice to “stuff your brain with seeds.” Curiosity is a key trait of the good communicator. My advice has always been to learn everything you can about everything you can. Those bits of knowledge, no matter how irrelevant they seem at the time of acquisition, are the seeds of the stories you will tell and the images you will create. When least expected they will blossom into fully formed ideas.

I hope that those stories, and images and ideas that are struggling to burst out of you to find life and meaning in the real world are good stories, and good images that impart truth, knowledge and insight, that provoke, nurture, surprise and delight. Stories that touch us, move us and move us forward.

I hope you find an editor and consultant as supportive and sharp-eyed as mine. My wife, Rose-Lee, is here with me tonight. For years, I have uttered hardly a word without showing it to her to gain her advice, solicit her suggestions, and, when I’m lucky, gain her approval.

I hope, in the age of e-mail shorthand and emoticons, you will continue to honor the power of language and of actual words. Mark Twain’s observation still holds that the difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. So does the more profound reminder from Confucius who said: “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done, remains undone.” And how much in our world remains undone.

I hope you will never lose your sense of humor. You’ll need it to confront the rejection and setbacks, so common in our field. But you need to incorporate it in your messages too, if you wish to truly connect. It’s been said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. It may also be the shortest distance between writer and reader, between audience and performer.
Whatever.

Laughter is still the best medicine (although someone recently added, “That’s because it’s so much cheaper than an HMO”.)

I hope that you will never lose the terror, respect and awe of the blank screen or blank page that confronts you, that threatens to freeze your brain in the face of a deadline. And as you sit there staring, that you will at last be inspired by the power of that page or screen to change the world. Churchill is said to have written the plan for the Battle of Britain on one side of a piece of paper.

In a society that’s becoming increasingly coarse and vulgar, I hope you might find ways to honor civility, perhaps even the elegant and the artful. It’s concerning that Alicia Keys said not long ago, speaking of our entertainment product, “The Internet and the TV and the videos and the movies and everything is just like a big soft-porn industry.” She sums up by saying: “If your elders are acting like that’s what they want you to do, how are you supposed to think anything else.” As Bill Bernbach, the legendary founder of DDB so famously put it: “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” I hope we can count on you to do the latter.

Finally, my last hope for you this evening is that as you pursue your careers as communicators, you might have at least half as much fun as I’ve had for the last half century. And that you might someday be as honored as I am to receive a “Distinguished Communicator” award from Cal State Fullerton’s College of Communications.”

For this important recognition, I thank you sincerely.