Playing the Numbers.

There's an old Borscht Belt joke (and if that isn't redundant, nothing is) about a guy freshly arrived in a giant prison like Sing-Sing. It's his first night and it's lights out and the new prisoner is laying in his bunk in his cell without any real lay of the land.

After a few moments of silence in the cell-block he hears someone cry out "Twenty-seven!" Immediately, everyone is practically doubled-over in laughter. 

Just as the yuks die down from another direction someone else yells, "One-hundred and nine!" Again, everyone is convulsed. 

This hilarity goes on for a while--someone screams out a number and the convicts laugh hysterically. 

The new prisoner is baffled and he asks his cellmate to explain. "Well," says the grizzled con, "we've all been here so long, we all know the same jokes. To save time, we've numbered them all. That's how we tell them"

Wanting to be "one of the boys," the new convict decides to give this process a go. He calls out "Fifty-one!" 

Crickets.

He tries again, "Thirty-three!" 

Again crickets.

He says to his cellmate, "How come when someone yells out a number everyone laughs, yet when I do there's silence."

His cellmate says, "You’re telling them wrong."

As I am fast coming to the end of my forty-second year in advertising, I wonder how much time and effort could have been saved if we in the industry had adopted a similar sort of short-cut for advertising trends.

What if we had numbered everything that was going to, irrevocably, change everything. Rather than talk about them, attend conferences on them, wear lanyards showing we're speaking about them, we simply called out a number.

In my decades, we might have had

"1! The :15 is going to change everything!"
"2! Cable is going to change everything!"
"3! Interactivity is going to change everything!"
"4! Social is going to change everything!"
"5! Google+ is going to change everything!"
"6! Four Square is going to change everything!"
"7! Digital shooting and editing are going to change everything!"
"8! Always on is going to change everything!"
"9! Digital typesetting is going to change everything!"
"10! Separating media and creative is going to change everything!"
"11! Bringing media and creative together is going to change everything!"
"12! Story-telling is going to change everything!"

I could easily get my list up to the hundreds--and before long, have as many statements as my convicts above had jokes.

The one thing that we've all forgotten is the wisdom of Trott, as in Dave Trott. Who explains, as much as everything changes every second of every day, what hasn't fundamentally changed is you and me, humans, and therefore, how communication works.

It goes like this. In that direction, and only that direction.

You have to start with impact or no one will notice or hear what you're saying.

You have to follow up and communicate something that's clear, intelligible and reasonable, or it will fly past people.

You have to persuade people to do it or think it, therefore buy or consider what you're sellin, otherwise, what's the point.         

When I started in the business it might take you a week to create a print ad. In a good year, you might produce fifteen ads, six radio spots and nine TV commercials. 

Today, we seem to produce that much in an afternoon. Literally hundreds of ads of all different sizes and descriptions that are supposed to influence your cerebellum when they arrive on whatever platform holds you in its thrall.

To be stupidly reductive about it (what I do best) we have replaced Impact with Inundation. 

We don't try to get a viewer's attention through humor, intelligence, beauty, reasoning, music, a celebrity. We get try to get it through an endless onslaught of inconsequential pinpricks.

 

As a consequence our industry has become Lilliputian. Tiny. We create gnat-like messages that pester viewers (or those who give up avoiding us) into submission.

CEOs don't care about us. 

CMOs regard us as an expense. 

And we are procured, like fifty-pound sacks of beans, by procurement.

If you don't like Trott's upside-down pyramid, you can try this chart which I copied from Communication Arts some time in the 1990s and have been using ever since. I don't know its original source.

It's not as good and simple as Trott's paradigm, but it's worth considering. And if you're not in box 2, or you don't want to be, you're missing, entirely, the point of all this.