I don't see a lot of ads nowadays.
Partly because there's no more print.
Partly because I have every adblocker known to humans.
Partly because I use one of those esoteric non-surveillance browsers that sits just shy and to the left of wearing a tin-foil hat.
And partly because I no longer can deal with television. Especially during the trumpocalypse.
And mostly because every time I do see or hear something, it's so aggressively stupid in the first mille-second that I've effectively blocked it by the second mille-second.
Even the latest Spike Jonze (who's no Spike Jones, btw) Apple five-minute spot, had me playing it at double speed. Even so, I lasted just 24-seconds.
A lot of my disdain is that ads no longer talk to peoples' brains. They talk only to their impulse or their wallets. If everything in the world is twenty-percent off, buy one get one free, and part of a Spring into savings sale-a-bration, nothing is.
I repeat.
When everything is on sale, nothing is.
When everything is loud, nothing is.
When everything is the same, nothing is noticed.
We don't notice anything because nothing is notable, noteworthy or even noticeable.
The funny thing is (funny to me, anyway) is I see a lot of great writing, a lot of great headlines, in a lot of places. Just not in advertising.
Take a look at this, which I just pulled from an email from Princeton University Press.
I've written 20,000 headlines over the last forty years. I'm not sure I've ever written one as good as above. And mind you, this is for a book from an academic press. This book will not be a best-seller. (It might not be a seller at all.)
Yet, someone took the time to write it, to design it, to approve it.
Someone decided, "That's new. That's different. That's interesting. That provides value to the reader."
All criteria missing from modern marketing (mis)communications.
Here are a few more. All from the same obscure Princeton University Press email.
I'd imagine there are people reading this who are now cursing me and saying to themselves, "George. You're talking apples and oranges. You're interested in the classics. And these book topics and titles are inherently more interesting."
I thought of that just now on my hundred-yard walk to the mailbox.
On the way back I flipped through the latest issue of The New Yorker that just arrived. And only ten days late as if I lived in Burundi.
Mind you, the New Yorker has an affluent and well-educated readership cohort. It probably overlaps with people who get emails from the Princeton University Press.
I saw these ads. Not even the worst of the 50 or so in this week's magazine.
There is nothing inherently uninteresting about comfortable shoes, taking an expensive cruise, or a well-made mattress. But each of these ads is so insipidly bland that I believe they'd actually suppress sales. People seeing them might say, "they're too care-less and dumb for me to even consider."
If the best selling point you can derive for a cruise that probably costs $20,000 for two is that you can a) dive in the sea and b) walk through a town square, I'd say you didn't try very hard. Likewise the Skechers Grinturbation. BTW, the "no touching shoes part is offensively wrong. If you're feet are in them, you've touched them. Likewise the Avocado mattress ad. I'm 67 years-old I've never once laid on an un-sheeted mattress with my keister pointing to the heavens in post-orgasmic repose.
I've posted what follows about one-hundred-and-eight times before. My friend Neil Raphan gave it to me before I taught a class for him at School of Visual Arts. That was thirty-two years ago.
The spiel was, there's really not that much a creative director has to do. Or, if a creative director insists on answers to just a few questions the work will improve.
This point seems to be as forgotten as kindness, manners and good jokes.
It can't be as hard as ad people are making it look.
