Circumlocution.

About twenty years ago I sold an experiential idea to a client that, I'll say with some boastfulness, was way ahead of its time. The idea was good and we executed it well and we worked our asses off making it happen. 

However, when it came time to promote the idea--so people could find it--the client decided they'd rather not spend the money. After sinking a couple million into the idea and the event, they decided they had spent enough and didn't want to sink a million more making sure people could actually find the thing.

That would be like the Metropolitan Museum in New York paying one-million bucks to display the Mona Lisa and then not telling anyone about it. If you have something to say, something to show that enhances your product and moves your brand, you have to actually tell people about it. Otherwise, in the inimitable words of my father, "you're pissing up a rope."

Advertising, in a sense, is a really well-done dating profile. If no one sees it, it doesn't matter how well-written and alluring it is. 

The client said to me, after all that work, they were going to have a soft launch.

I'll say this about clients--many clients anyway.

They're really good at coming up with phrases that sound positive but are really destructive to their ends. 

Imagine if Werner von Braun told Hitler that he was soft-launching the V2 rocket. Or if he told NASA that he was soft-launching America's Apollo missions.

Launches don't get to be soft.

You either launch it or you don't. 

It's really that simple. And no dastardly circumlocution will change a feckless lack-of-commitment into anything other than a feckless lack-of-commitment.

Soft launching something is a foregone conclusion. Soft launches are (almost tautologically) failures. Because a launch has to be real or it's not a launch at all.

Not too long ago I got a call from a new client. They wanted me to do a lot for their brand--defining who they are--not just writing ads.

I did what I had to do and, as they asked, I came back to them with what I thought was a fair proposal--based on the job they wanted doing, the competitive set they're in, the size of the company and their ambition.

Let's say my price was 6X.

They came back and said "We're scrappy. We can't pay more than 1X."

It took me a week to realize that "scrappy" was another one of those linguistic dry-humps like "soft launch." Scrappy was a feckless way of saying we're cheap and we don't believe in either advertising or in you.

It took me about a minute more to walk away from my bid.

So much of so called advertising today is "soft launch." A bunch of tiny "social" doodads that no one (outside of the linked-in or twitter amen-chorus) ever sees. Case studies, almost wholly works of fiction, talk about their impact and their billions of impressions. But no one ever sees the actual work and their non-solipsistic effect cannot be measured because there is none. 

The Economist said not all that long ago that the United States is in a start-up boom. But with the exception of a small group of those start-ups, 99% die never having gotten off their investor decks. They don't tell people en masse who they are, what they do and why you can't live without them.

They soft launch.

Showing up as an end-cap for one week then disappearing because no one knew who, what, why, when or where.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, but he's been around, really, since the beginning of time. 

Calgacus called a spade a spade. In Latin.

2000 years ago, during the height of the Roman Empire, Calgacus, a Caledonian Chieftan was quoted by Tacitus in his volume "Agricola." The Romans destroyed everything in their wake--especially if the besieged put up any resistance. Calgacus said "solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." They make a desert and call it peace.

In my childhood, a US Major at the Battle of Bén Tre in Vietnam in 1968 said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." (An Orwell-McNamara-ism is there ever was one.)

Earlier this week, a number of people including the gunman himself and a cop were killed in a Manhattan office tower. The gunman was using something everyone feels comfortable calling "an assault rifle." Like the phrase "defensive weapons," this makes me wonder if some rifles tickle or caress victims and only the bad ones--the mean rifles--assault people.

"Oh, don't worry about that psychopath with a gun--that's not an assault rifle--that's a tummy-rub rifle."

We seem to forget--and to have always have forgotten--that words have actual meaning. The united states went full Orwell in 1947 when an act of congress renamed the Department of War the anodyne and deceptive Department of Defense.

Some years ago I heard an advertising story. I'm not protecting anyone here, I truly forget the names of the people involved. Let's just say that the client was working with a very-acclaimed, very-high-end copywriter whose name was on the door of his agency.

Despite all that copywriter's accomplishments--and the fact that the client had sought out and hired that very copywriter, the client decided to rewrite all of the copywriter's copy.

The client was scribbling over the copywriter's copy and said something like, "I guess I'm just a frustrated copywriter."

I'd guess almost everyone reading this post has heard something like that a couple dozen times in their career. 

The copywriter replied, "No, I'm a frustrated copywriter. You're an asshole."

That's how we should use language.

With accuracy.