Tells.

If I had to again work at an agency, or freelance for an agency, or somehow be involved in a TV production, I'd enter the assignment looking for certain tells.

Tells: those signs that let you know the stuff someone is made of or what they're thinking before they're even thinking it.

Tells in baseball might be a pitcher who sticks out his tongue as he's preparing to snap off a curve. In cards, it might be someone involuntarily raising an eyebrow as he looks at his hand. In politics, it might be a politician who kicks a kid when he thinks no one is looking.

In the ad industry, there are as many tells as there are smells.

68-page powerpoints are a tell.

Trademarked processes for ideation.

People who use the word ideation.

For me, the most blatant tell is people who call commercials "films."

If you hear someone do so, I'd run from the scene as fast as I'd run from a doctor who says "this won't hurt a bit." Or a stock-broker who's selling a "sure thing." Or a politician who says he's for restoring law and order.

Anyone who calls a commercial a "film" is a pompous twit. Worse, they don't understand the distinction between art and commerce. A distinction fundamental to the very purpose of advertising.

In advertising, we do commercials. 

Commercials are moving images meant to convey information and create a feeling that make you want to buy something or try something. 

Films have a much more elevated purpose. Involving art and beauty, and the kind of truth that is on a plane higher than a mere product truth.

I saw this Volvo commercial the other day and can't brush the taste of pretense out of my mouth. Creating a commercial about a car that fits "all your yous" and expecting it to be regarded as non-generic, that is a commercial that could be for any car ever made, is ludicrous. 

But the sequence that really gets me lasts an interminable amount of time between seconds :15 and :18. The "film" match cuts different circles. The spinning of a car tire, a bike tire, the turning of a knob, pottery on a wheel, the circular Volvo logo.

I can hear the blind Greek chorus of agency people and clients marveling at that spinning symmetry and saying aloud, "that's a beautiful film." 

The problem I have is that I can't see any purpose behind the chosen images. They tell me nothing about the car or the car company except that maybe they don't understand what people want from a car. They also tell me that no one involved in the spot understands how people watch TV. There's nothing in that sequence, or any of the other 720-frames of film, that tells me anything unique, interesting or anything that might make me look up or think.

My sense of most of the world today is that we're too interested in doing cool things or talking about the latest cause célebrè to focus on what's important. 

We're making films. 
Not selling products.

Not searching for that truth that makes something worthwhile. That makes something stand out.

We're trying to out "beauty," or out "poetry," and somewhere along the way "out-real and out-relevant and out-empathize" have gotten lost.

We seem, as an industry, to care more about the films we make than the people we serve.

That's the most shocking tell of all.