I suppose it's as human as farting.
As a species, we find ways to focus on everything but what's important.
Agencies announce, seemingly weekly, their triumph as Network of the Year, seldom paying attention to the fact that they lose 20-percent of their revenue and 30-percent of their people annually. As Yogi Berra is said to have said, "sure we're lost. But we're making good time."
That might be a good epigram for our species.
The religious wars that have destroyed the world many times over and wiped out hundreds of millions of people, were usually about some peculiarity of interpretation of some obscure point of debate. The nature of the Trinity. They were rarely about doing unto others.
The examples are countless. And they continue to accumulate. Like snowflakes in Frost's woods. Or lies from Washington.
Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory," widely regarded as one of the greatest histories ever written, wrote about such "ironies."
In advertising, individually and as an industry, we grasp at every new new thing. A new director. A new Adobe tool. A new AI protocol. A new way of slicing data. New generation. New "cultural" signpost, aka, fad.
We are so headlong in the pursuit of the new that we ignore the always been.
One of the most intelligent columns in any journal that's still standing, is the "Bartleby" column in "The Economist." There is usually more vim in a single Bartleby column than there are in a trillion Seth Godin blatherings. Not to mention a LinkedIn post from a holding company impotentate.
What's more the name of the column, after Melville's Scrivener--and perhaps history's first 'quiet quitter,' is so adroit it almost makes me angry. Oh well. As Melville wrote in Chapter 86, 'The Tail', of "Moby Dick," "In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority." As a species and as a tribute to Melville, we wriggle away from consistency.
This week's Bartleby column is about repetition. And how we ignore it to our own detriment.
We certainly ignore repetition in advertising. Where we change campaigns way too often. As often as clients change agencies or agencies change teams. Or agencies replace C-suites.
As creatives and as an industry, we make the colossal mistake in believing something registers just because you said it once. Anyone who's ever been in a relationship with someone else knows that that idea is as stupid as a musk. As the old Henny Youngman joke goes, "I have to say everything to my wife three times. She ignores two-thirds of everything I say."
What's extra dumb is that in response to the demise of the three network era when repetition ruled the airwaves (Two, two, two mints in one) rather than redoubling our single-mindedness as media became schizoid, we became schizoid along with it. You can't out fractal a fractal. You can only out-focus it.
The Economist writes:
In communications--in advertising--we've prioritized new (not news) over consistency. I think of a probably apocryphal story I attributed to Ted Bates of the old Ted Bates agency. He's showing a client around the agency and the client says, "We haven't changed our campaign in ten years. What do all these people do? Bates replied, "They keep you from changing it."
A Stanford University study (for those of you who still believe in facts) reports:
Much of my business comes to me because I have the temerity to ask clients "what do you do/make/sell? How is it different? What's your 'Ultimate Driving Machine.'?"
Realizing they can't answer me, they usually write me a check.
Luckily, I usually get repeat business.
