Why We Write.

It's been busy at GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company with two or three new business calls happening every two or three days. 

It doesn't much matter if the clients calling are selling a complex technology or a fast-moving consumer good or a vacation destination where it never rains except when I visit. 

Clients have a damn-hard time saying what they do and how they're different. Alex Murrell wrote about this a couple years ago in his excellent essay "The Age of Average." The age hasn't gotten any-less-average now that half of the benighted world is using the same pattern-matching AI technology to blanderize and cheapify their creative.

If you doubt that businesses know how to tell prospects what they do, take ten minutes and read some ad agency about sections. You can find them all at the intersection of pablum, blather, bushwa and pretense.

Say hi for me.

For the past few nights I've been reading Moudhy Al-Rashid's new book, "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History." You can, and should, order it here. And read it.
Assuming you can still read.

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Al-Rashid's book starts, really, at the beginning of history, as opposed to pre-history. That is to the beginning of writing.

 

Talking to so many prospective clients who don't know what they sell--why it exists, what makes it different, what it does--and seeing the same shortcomings in nearly every commercial I see and everything I run across, it seems to me we, as a society and an industry, might have lost the "writing plot." By that I mean, we've lost the original purpose of what writing was for.

Cuneiform, shown above, is humankind's earliest writing. It's about 6000 years old--predating the pyramids, the bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey and my 271 missing time-sheets from my decades at Ogilvy.

 

There's a sign in the desert in what is today Iraq, outside of a city that was called Uruk. The sign is blue and sits near an ancient Ziggurat. It reads "The first written words started here."

 

Those first written words were not poetry, or love songs, or beautiful dramas and flowery language. They were who grew how much barley. Who needs how much beer. Who owes what to whom. As Al-Rashid writes:

The first writing was hard-working muscular "let-me-explain-it-to-you-writing." It's the writing we've forgotten how to do and use.

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Robert Caro, my favorite living writer, winner of two-Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards said in his great book "Working,"  “One of the reasons I believed I had become a reporter in the first place was to find out how things really worked and to explain those workings."

I've rewritten Caro, as I re-write everyone. My job, the job of a copywriter is to "Find out how things work and explain them to people."

Somewhere along the way, as a business, advertising has gotten waylaid by art. We no longer want to do the explaining. We want to be rockstars, directors, artists, singers and poets.

Those are all legitimate pursuits.
But they're not the job of those of us in advertising.

In advertising, we're supposed to help people by helping them understand why they need or want something. Why this particular something is better than a competing particular something. 

Yes, as above, that should be done with artistry, skill, wit, humor and intelligence. But we have to remember, people won't pay for something--they certainly won't pay extra for something--if they don't understand what it does, why it's special and why they can't live without it.

Before the current president was reputedly elected, I wrote a note to her opponent's campaign, urging her opponent to run ads like these. Ads that would say what she was going to do. Not ads, as she was running, that alleged to tell you how she might make you feel.

I believe ads like this work.