I watched one the other day and it was horrid. Lazy, regurgitated, soul-and-life-less. And I couldn't care less about how cheap and how fast you blight the world with your artificially derived projectile regurgitation.
Here's a word for you. Look it up on your AI.
It was solipsistic: Important to you only because it's about you.
It was solipsistic: Important to you only because it's about you.
As I descend further and further into my dotage and decrepitude, I watch less and less TV. About six months ago, I finally gave up watching the TV game show Jeopardy! because it had turned to be too much about small talk and pop-culture, and too little about genuinely interesting information. After 15 years of watching it with some regularity, I gave it up cold tofu.
Even the Knicks, who seem decent this year, I find unwatchable. And as for football and baseball, I find the games excruciating and dull, the announcers worse, and the over-emphasis on stats deadening to my brain. Like it deadens the brains of the CTE-afflicted young men who concuss their lives for your gladiatorial benefit.
What's more, on my Mac, I've installed every privacy adjunct known to the Chinese government and our surveillance capitalist state. I get dumb promoted posts, usually featuring a big-bosomed woman chopping onions, but seldom a bona-fide ad, as if there is such a thing as a bona-fide ad anymore.
In short, I seldom see anything of interest from the world of advertising unless it comes from someone in the world of advertising and therefore, somehow, gets through my defenses and reaches me.
That is to say, while I make my not-inconsiderable income from advertising, I have very little intercourse with what's left of the advertising business. Of course, when I see in Ad Age a commercial like this (I can't download it for some reason) it's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and afterwards getting Norovirus and vomiting for 96-hours. It would take wild rats to drag me back. Or wild horses.
For all the years I lived in Manhattan, most of my long life, I've walked by news kiosks that usually sold a variety of horse racing forms. If you were into the ponies, you could see who was running, where, who the jockey was, and the odds. If you weren't, these periodicals were completely invisible. You'd just as likely see them as you would individual particles of nitrogen in the air you breathe.
Most ads are like the racing form.
People, as Howie said, read what interests them. But most people don't bother making anything interesting.
Too much work.
About 35 years ago, after I had become the youngest Senior Vice President and Group Creative Head at Ally & Gargano, I was asked to teach a class at the School of Visual Arts. My colleague, Neal Raphan, was a long-time teacher there. Still is.
He gave me a sheaf of papers that somewhat codified what a creative director does, to help teach the students to scrutinize the efficacy of their own work.
I've kept that sheaf for all these years and tinkered with it through the years. Though it's stayed essential the same. Because people have stayed essentially the same since we came down from sleeping in trees as the woodlands climate-changed into a savannah.
For about ten years, I've been ranting that people have stopped caring about ads and even brands because ads and even brands have stopped caring about them.
The following could help. Maybe we can teach it to machines so they don't suck so loud.
But there's no one left who cares.
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