Simple Simplicity.

About two months ago, I read a short piece in a sustainability newsletter from The Wall Street Journal. It's hard for me to believe that every ambitious person in the ad industry doesn't read the Journal. I know its politics are to the right of Atilla the Hun, but the Journal provides so much useful information that it makes you a better creative and of more value to clients. 

I can't tell you how often I hear, from Fortune 500 clients, "we don't know what to do. But you'll figure it out. You know everything." That's in large measure because I read the Journal.

When I was a boy in the business, the Journal had a long-running ad campaign in which they profiled creative stars. They were mostly male in those days, sorry for what looks like a trumpian selection. 

The point of these profiles was that everyone of these luminaries (the people I aspired to work for and become) said why they read the Journal. I took that to heart. Just like a golfer might switch to a new kind of putter if a great pro does, I took the advice of the successful, and have been reading the paper for almost half-a-century.

Back to the sustainability newsletter I mentioned above and the primary point of this post. The newsletter profiles Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO and former director of engineering at Facebook. 

Back in 2017, from his estate in Hawaii, Wong decided to turn his talents to fighting climate change. He started a company called Terraformation. Their goal is to plant one trillion trees. That's 1,000,000,000,000 trees. Those trees, and three billiion acres of woodlands reforested would begin a carbon accelerator. (For scale, the entire US is "only" 2.3 billion acres.)

But here's the phrase that pays. The phrase the ad industry could learn from. I write this even though seven of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company's ten largest clients are in the technology business.

Wong looked at every climate change proposal ever made. He concluded, "a high-tech approach would generate more problems than it solved."

He said,“Silicon Valley is great at marketing, and they make it sound like new tech is awesome, but really no one hates technology more than a technologist because in the lab when it is half formed it breaks all the time. So you want a very low-tech, reliable solution."

The last 25 years of my benighted career the ad industry has chased after tech solutions. Ads people would interact with. Customizable ads. Always on ads. AI-derived ads. 

All any of those tech solutions have done is alienate viewers, decrease effectiveness and destroy our industry. 

The other night I watched this 73-year-old clip of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin from Chaplin's 1952 movie "Limelight."

It's a good example of a "very low-tech, reliable solution." No special effects. No laugh track. No AI. Just old pros doing things that have made humans laugh since about the beginning of time.

What if advertising went back to the things that made humans interested? Real comedy? Real emotion? Important information? What if instead of chasing people we provided value, so we would be welcomed?

What if advertising made people laugh? What if it afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted? What if it treated people with respect? What if it helped them buy?

All "very low-tech, reliable solution(s)."

This post was not written by AI.