Summertime! And though the livin’ ain’t exactly easy, the heat haze that blurs the late afternoon light hitting the pines on the far Rosseau shore out past Ted Rogers’ place somehow suggests the dreamy, long-lens perspective that descends on the ad world this time of year.

Ted’s a neighbor of ours in Muskoka cottage country north of Toronto, and though we haven’t met, I salute his genius each time we cruise past the rambling Rogers family enclave and marina.

Rogers Communications Incorporated lost $168 million last year, according to Canadian Business, suggesting the potential dockside conversation-starter Hey, Ted, like I guess you won’t be gettin’ that new boat this year, eh?

But I read somewhere that Ted pays himself around $4 million in spite of everything, so there’s one imagined conversation that’s unlikely to make it into the Annals of Real Life. As I said, the guy’s a genius.

More summertime reveries were sparked this month by The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business story on the merger of St. Clair Paint & Wallpaper with my old client (three separate go-rounds, fired twice, resigned once) Color Your World.

It was the cyw experience that first taught me the folly of trying to tell a rich man, even nicely, that he was doing something The Wrong Way.

I worked for an advertising outfit called McConnell-Eastman when said rich man picked the agency out of the Yellow Pages (because it sounded Scottish and frugal and sensible) to be His Agency.

He’d incorporated a company called Paint Rite Stores, based on a trip to California where he’d seen a chain of freestanding paint stores doing nicely, and having inherited the Tonecraft Paint manufacturing capacity, determined to sell Tonecraft by another name on a low-price, high-volume strategy via Paint Rite.

The account was assigned to my creative group, and with art director Hartley Strauss, we cooked up the name Color Your World, and singing, dancing and pleading, rammed it down the Tonecraft family’s throats.

The cyw name was considered so unremarkable by its owners that I’m told they didn’t even bother to legally register and protect it, years after it became an established trading name.

They did other funny things, this manufacturing-obsessed family compact.

They disbelieved media measurement studies, and chose their media plans based on one of the owners’ wife’s reading and listening habits. They stocked ironing boards in a paint store, and were astounded when they didn’t move.

They decided to expand into wallpaper manufacturing, and bought a gigantic Dutch printing press with roughly the capacity to print every page of The Toronto Star every day, in color, and make it sticky on one side as well.

They paid for consumer research that showed people overwhelmingly equated high price with high quality when it came to paint, and then refused to retail a high-priced paint, sending the shopper seeking the reassurance of a high price product to a rival store.

And they did smart things, too. Their new location strategy was to buy land within 300 yards of wherever McDonald’s opened. They stocked shelves with 20 facings of one color, like pc products.

And they hired a young agency started by the two guys who thought up the Color Your World name, fired us once, and had the uncommon decency to admit they’d made a mistake, and hired us back again!

And they got rich, or, in their case, richer.

It probably wasn’t the advertising, either, because except for a short burst where we had an independent lab test their paint against cil and Sherwin-Williams twice-the-price paint, and published the results in one of Canada’s first comparative advertising campaigns (which The Toronto Star initially refused to run because it wasn’t nice), they didn’t like advertising that told a story about the product.

Just snappy lines like Interior Acrylic Latex, and the every-day-low-price.

(It’s been said a Cocker Spaniel could have become rich buying and selling land in the 1970s, but that’s both disparaging, and ignores the central fact that cyw was a high quality paint at a terrific price.

But John Torella did observe that if cyw had powerful ads, they’d have driven Eaton’s and a bunch of others out of the paint business.)

We finally lost the business, the last time we lost it, to an agency that was really frugal. They took the account for 5% commission!

Moral: The rich may be wrong, but if they’re still rich, you can’t prove it.

Barry Base is president and creative director of Barry Base & Partners, Toronto.