First, it's going to be fairly-heavy-duty and come Friday in our late Systems Collapse era, we'd probably all be better-served by a cold foam half cream double-shot dose of hemlock-scented arsenic. Instead of what you're about to get.
It won't go down easy. And yes, I resisted a Stormy Daniels joke.
Second, I don't know if my ability to see the things I see and make the leaps I make is a strength or a weakness. I read about the waning days of Tsar Nicholas II and I see advertising holding companies and, sadly, amerrykaka. I see life lessons and ad lessons wherever I look, from Neolithic Britain to Ancient Greece--and when I'm feeling especially potent, I use them in the almost daily new business calls I seem to have bursting at the seams of my Microsoft Calendar.
I suppose people roll their eyes and lament, "that's George. He's mad as a hatter, but he can write ads like a sumbitch."
Just now I read an article in The Economist.
Thank you, David Abbott.
I started reading The Economist because of your ads; I stayed because the magazine was smart, well edited, and wittier than anything you'd find within sixteen miles of any ad agency anywhere.
Their articles are short, to the point. They never have "to continue, turn to page 27." And--because they know the Economist is not your source for daily news--their articles are different. You don't read The Economist for the ebb and flow of topicality. You read it for errant angstroms of insight flaked with humor (or, even, humour.)
If you know me at all, and you look at the clip above, you can probably think of eleventeen reasons why it stopped me. The plight of incessant shorterizing. And then the Orson Welles-ian picture of Churchill in flagrante delicto, like Charles Foster Kane.
But for all the words in the article, it was a single sentence that got me, reminded me of GeorgeCo's Unique Selling Proposition, and where so many of my competitors fail and fail abjectly.
"...[they] can no longer even articulate our inadequacy."
From an advertising point of view--which is what so often matters to me because it's how I earn my daily Milk Bone--most people can no longer make salient what a client does, how they're different and articulate it in such a way as to make our clients' offerings engaging, important, worth noticing and paying attention to.
My sense is that 99.97-percent of all advertising is a mere joke--and a not very adroit one, or a BOGO offer or jargon or, worst of all, a little dance that some masturbatory creative director believes will go viral.
Very little articulates something important to a viewer. We make commercials with all kinds of musical, sound-design and cinematic doodads that mean fuck-all to people with a problem.
In fact, if amerrykaka is still a country and we have a presidential election at all in four years, I'd suggest to whoever is running the opposition candidate's campaign (if opposition is allowed) that despite the one-billion dollars the democrats spent in 2024 they were unable to articulate the inadequacy of our government and its policies and its people and how we will fix that.
That's why we're in the state we're in.
In advertising, too.
Advertising has always been excoriated by people like Orwell. I get it.
But today our rattling stick is so esoteric it doesn't rattle anymore. No one hears it. It whispers.
Our job is to articulate a scintilla of humanity about a brand, product or service so people see you care and want to make a difference.
Do that. Or inadequate.
And sorry for the Friday post.
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