Why advertising gives up
When I finished emailing my Mom recently, a little animated text ad popped up next to my "sent" confirmation. Here's how it went:
Stage one: "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." -Oscar Wilde
Stage two: "Not all quotes are this confusing."
Stage three: A bunch of hard-sell tactics with a red logo at the bottom stumping for Safeco Insurance.
Um, what? I can see pulling something from Yogi Berra or Francis Fukuyama* and getting confused, but this quote is freaking crystal. Dull people don't stay out all night. Therefore, they're not nursing a hangover in the morning. Done. Anyone not on the same page with me should go back to kindergarten and learn the names of shapes. This ad is known as "hard-working" in the biz. It so desperately wants to be clever that it shoehorns its intent (to sell insurance) into a stamp-sized envelope created by the writer. I know. I've been guilty of this when I wrote ads. The first product I wrote for was the syndication of the Larry Sanders Show. My first line went something like this: "Larry Sanders...so shallow you can read the dates off the pennies at the bottom of his soul." Eek! That line doesn't even call in sick when it's dead. What can I say? It was my first day. I didn't know what the Hell I was doing. My first creative director told me I needed to be writing ads that could be understood by a 14-year-old retard in Kansas. For Gary Shandling's sense of humor?! That show was withering smart, and my creative direction was aimed at people who can't pronounce "withering." I'll give that old CD the benefit of the doubt and assume he was metaphorizing Ockham's razor. It's cool. I got better. I had help. Within no time, I was turning out cheeky one-liners for a scotch brand, frisky, sex-dripping catalog copy for some French lingerie, faux poetry for a ballet company. During this period of my employed life, people were always asking me "Why are some ads so bad?" This is like asking a pitching coach why his team lost. I could walk out on the mound every so often, but once the ball was out of my hands, it was out of my hands. I can assure you that I was writing über-hip, compelling copy that would have had you killing your grandmother, collecting the inheritance, and spending all of it on my products. (Well, not YOU, but...) The best ad campaign I made was two weeks into my internship. It involved a New York cigarette company, the recent legislation that outlawed smoking in bars, and a visual tag so punch-happy it would have failed a breathalizer. When the client didn't buy it, I was one saliva molecule away from jamming my thumb up their asshole. This was not the most auspicious beginning. I came to understand that lots of ads just give up, because admakers are perpetually in a state of giving up. (Think of admakers as those Greenpeace dudes who sail some barely seaworthy wreck out among armed whale poachers...except they don't really give a shit about saving whales.) Admakers are constantly watching these scales where on one side clients are saying "We don't have a clue what we're doing" and on the other side they're saying "You have no clue what we want." And then when it gets to the stage where they are saying "We have no clue what WE want"--and it will, you are basically working for a pimple-faced honor student with anarchy symbols drawn all over his easy-fit jeans. There is this completely delicate thing good admakers do which can only be compared to mind-reading, except they're reading the minds of thousands of people four months from now. I had a teacher in high school who only read the first two pages of any paper I wrote and assigned me a "B." How many good papers did I write for her? None. How many good first two pages did I write? Enough. This is how I looked at ads. My cynical view is good ads slip through the cracks. Circumstance is on the creators' side. Some marketing VP gets fired, and everyone in that company's answer to everything is "I don't have time for this." At that point, your really on-the-fucking-ball account executive turns into Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. But these moments are fucking rare. And the lag time is unbearable. Have you ever talked to a person in marketing? These people spent four plus years of college learning how to think dumb. And then you get them alone, and they're all "Between you and me, I think your ideas are really strong, but that's because we're too smart for this industry." WE are not too smart. Either I suck at my job, or your mouth is a rectum. These are the people who are confused by Oscar Wilde quotes. They are so arrogant they refuse to see themselves as dull, and simultaneously cannot imagine themselves NOT being brilliant, EVER, breakfast included. Anyway, sometimes, the cracks are wider than others. For instance, here in LJ, a trash daily called Direkt launched a three-week teaser campaign, where they combined punk rock aesthetics with censorship bars over eyes, girls' butts, headlines...even the name of the pub. The thinking here as I imagine it is this kind of simple. Punk rock aesthetics are basically garbage...unless you're a 50-year-old alt-rag columnist or a tween from Toronto. So, let's use this overblown look for our second-rate newspaper. The effect is on! You can get an idea from their website: www.direkt.si Don't get me wrong. I like advertising. I like Saturday NYT crossword puzzles. I like trying to catch lizards with my hands.
*Here's a playlet inspired by FF starring me and my friend Seth.
Me: Say, Seth. What was life like 50 years ago?
Seth: Dunno. I wasn't born yet. And I'm too busy voting my ass off to think about yesterday.
Me: I walked past a church today.
Seth: Right on. Get your Adidas off my Ikea ottoman, dude.
Stage one: "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." -Oscar Wilde
Stage two: "Not all quotes are this confusing."
Stage three: A bunch of hard-sell tactics with a red logo at the bottom stumping for Safeco Insurance.
Um, what? I can see pulling something from Yogi Berra or Francis Fukuyama* and getting confused, but this quote is freaking crystal. Dull people don't stay out all night. Therefore, they're not nursing a hangover in the morning. Done. Anyone not on the same page with me should go back to kindergarten and learn the names of shapes. This ad is known as "hard-working" in the biz. It so desperately wants to be clever that it shoehorns its intent (to sell insurance) into a stamp-sized envelope created by the writer. I know. I've been guilty of this when I wrote ads. The first product I wrote for was the syndication of the Larry Sanders Show. My first line went something like this: "Larry Sanders...so shallow you can read the dates off the pennies at the bottom of his soul." Eek! That line doesn't even call in sick when it's dead. What can I say? It was my first day. I didn't know what the Hell I was doing. My first creative director told me I needed to be writing ads that could be understood by a 14-year-old retard in Kansas. For Gary Shandling's sense of humor?! That show was withering smart, and my creative direction was aimed at people who can't pronounce "withering." I'll give that old CD the benefit of the doubt and assume he was metaphorizing Ockham's razor. It's cool. I got better. I had help. Within no time, I was turning out cheeky one-liners for a scotch brand, frisky, sex-dripping catalog copy for some French lingerie, faux poetry for a ballet company. During this period of my employed life, people were always asking me "Why are some ads so bad?" This is like asking a pitching coach why his team lost. I could walk out on the mound every so often, but once the ball was out of my hands, it was out of my hands. I can assure you that I was writing über-hip, compelling copy that would have had you killing your grandmother, collecting the inheritance, and spending all of it on my products. (Well, not YOU, but...) The best ad campaign I made was two weeks into my internship. It involved a New York cigarette company, the recent legislation that outlawed smoking in bars, and a visual tag so punch-happy it would have failed a breathalizer. When the client didn't buy it, I was one saliva molecule away from jamming my thumb up their asshole. This was not the most auspicious beginning. I came to understand that lots of ads just give up, because admakers are perpetually in a state of giving up. (Think of admakers as those Greenpeace dudes who sail some barely seaworthy wreck out among armed whale poachers...except they don't really give a shit about saving whales.) Admakers are constantly watching these scales where on one side clients are saying "We don't have a clue what we're doing" and on the other side they're saying "You have no clue what we want." And then when it gets to the stage where they are saying "We have no clue what WE want"--and it will, you are basically working for a pimple-faced honor student with anarchy symbols drawn all over his easy-fit jeans. There is this completely delicate thing good admakers do which can only be compared to mind-reading, except they're reading the minds of thousands of people four months from now. I had a teacher in high school who only read the first two pages of any paper I wrote and assigned me a "B." How many good papers did I write for her? None. How many good first two pages did I write? Enough. This is how I looked at ads. My cynical view is good ads slip through the cracks. Circumstance is on the creators' side. Some marketing VP gets fired, and everyone in that company's answer to everything is "I don't have time for this." At that point, your really on-the-fucking-ball account executive turns into Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. But these moments are fucking rare. And the lag time is unbearable. Have you ever talked to a person in marketing? These people spent four plus years of college learning how to think dumb. And then you get them alone, and they're all "Between you and me, I think your ideas are really strong, but that's because we're too smart for this industry." WE are not too smart. Either I suck at my job, or your mouth is a rectum. These are the people who are confused by Oscar Wilde quotes. They are so arrogant they refuse to see themselves as dull, and simultaneously cannot imagine themselves NOT being brilliant, EVER, breakfast included. Anyway, sometimes, the cracks are wider than others. For instance, here in LJ, a trash daily called Direkt launched a three-week teaser campaign, where they combined punk rock aesthetics with censorship bars over eyes, girls' butts, headlines...even the name of the pub. The thinking here as I imagine it is this kind of simple. Punk rock aesthetics are basically garbage...unless you're a 50-year-old alt-rag columnist or a tween from Toronto. So, let's use this overblown look for our second-rate newspaper. The effect is on! You can get an idea from their website: www.direkt.si Don't get me wrong. I like advertising. I like Saturday NYT crossword puzzles. I like trying to catch lizards with my hands.
*Here's a playlet inspired by FF starring me and my friend Seth.
Me: Say, Seth. What was life like 50 years ago?
Seth: Dunno. I wasn't born yet. And I'm too busy voting my ass off to think about yesterday.
Me: I walked past a church today.
Seth: Right on. Get your Adidas off my Ikea ottoman, dude.
posted by J Wilson at Saturday, September 17, 2005
3 Comments:
We were--er, are--too poor to buy the matching ottoman. Recently you circulated an article about music collections, email subject line "this article sings." I passed it along to a friend of mine. Here is his reply:
As an indication of where I am in my life, this reminds me of oven shopping. I am obsessed with food and cooking. I’m shopping for a stove on my puny budget. A woman in Home Depot Expo is buying a $10,000 Viking range. The sales guy asks her if she wants single or dual convection in the oven, and she says that she never cooks and doesn’t know what convection is. She just heard that this was a good stove and it looks cool in the kitchen.
When facts disprove theories satirized through art, only to later have that fiction reinforced through reportage is the new definition of "culture."
http://www.missrepresentation.com/archives/
2005/09/crafty.html
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