Slag Bag.

This is a metaphor.

Patrick Coffee, who writes about marketing in The Wall Street Journal, and I are acquaintances. 

When he wrote for Business Insider, he'd email me or call me now and again about a lead or to answer a question. Of course, I couldn't pick him out of a line-up. And, I'll admit, I don't read him with great regularity. 

Last Thursday, however, Coffee had an article in the Journal that caught my cataract-recovering eyes. Particularly the sentence I highlighted below, "AI could have produced another hundred pieces of content."

I've puzzled over that sentence for almost a week now. I'm not trying to be dense. I just don't get it.

If you're reading this and you do get it, please help me out. Send me a note or something, like a 168-page "media landscape" presentation. 

I don't understand why any brand needs 100 pieces of content. Shakespeare, over the long decades of his prolific career, wrote 37 plays. Seinfeld, which ran for ten years, produced 172 episodes.

The Economist campaign by Abbott Mead Vickers, over many decades probably produced a few hundred ads. Alfredo Marcantonio's book, "Well Written and Red," collects many of those ads. It is only 256-pages long. At an average of 1.5 ads per page, that's under 400 ads.

Another book edited by Marcantonio, "Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?" which collected decades and decades of VW print from about the world is just 364-pages long. At 1.5 ads per page that's about 525 ads.

And Richard W. Lewis' "Absolute Book," which collects decades of Absolut ads is 250 pages long. Again, my 1.5 calculation gets to about 400 ads.

Let me go back to the sentence from Coffee's story that I highlighted. And let me ask a simple question.

What is all this content for? 

Why do we need 100 pieces?

Is the real difference in advertising today is that as an industry, we have replaced "Stopping Power," with the purported power of "Inundation"? BTW, that would be like choosing to dig a tunnel through a mountain using drip-erosion rather than nitro-glycerin. 

Maybe someone somewhere, presumably a McKinsey or Bain MBA working as a holding company consultant did the calculus and convinced a McKinsey or Bain MBA working at a holding company on the efficacy of inundation as opposed to impact-i-dation.

I would like to see the data or hear the argument.

When I get 97 direct mail pieces offering me 10,000 bonus points, $200 cash back and 1% off everything I buy, up to a 99-cent limit, all to cajole me into a credit card I don't want, need and didn't ask for, I get annoyed. And I get about 97 direct mail pieces a day.

(If you're ever really blue, buy yourself a $99 shredder and shred the direct mail you get. You'll feel better.)

I can't imagine I'm alone with this feeling. I don't like ads everywhere. I don't like getting credit card offers when I'm trying to order some Kung Pau.

For as long as I've been in advertising, I've heard about getting "the right message in the right place at the right time." I'm 67-years old and have yet to see an example.

Maybe that's what those 100 pieces of content do.

Maybe they're just the advertising equivalent of the slag heaps that pile up on the outskirts of coal-mining towns. A pile of detritus once they've taken out the anthracite. It threatens everything around it.

That sounds right, or wrong, to me.

For me the big question is Impact or Inundation.

I understand impact is hard to bet on. Inundation is more count-on-able. Anyone can do it.

And usually does.