Think Too Small.

If you pay attention to ads on LinkedIn and sites like it, you'll see a lot of ads for creative people at either agencies or on the client-side. Reading these ads, I wonder if people any long know what advertising can do for them. The ads read like the example below. They're 98-percent gorp, 99.9-percent from a planet that no longer resembles the one I was born on.

An ad for a creative person should say, "create ads that stop people and change their minds about a product and help them buy it." That's all.

I wonder if like many inventions before it, advertising has, quickly, gone from something that in the right hands is miraculous. To something that is dull, boring and prosaic.

What started as a breakthrough and a business advantage has turned into a public utility.

Advertising, it might be argued, has created more wealth for more people in more places than any other form of communication in the history of the earth. But instead of using the incredible power even someone working in the basement of his seaside cottage has at his Mac-tips, we inundate the digital airwaves with clichés, dopiness and clipart.

You might think of advertising like you might have thought about electricity 150 years ago, or air-conditioning 75 years ago, or automatic transmission, or color TV 50 years ago, all those "take-for-granted-todays" were once considered amazing. 

Once advertising was, in the hands of agencies that cared and clients who believed in it, responsible for great fortunes and huge percentage gains in marketshare. I'm thinking of Apple, Nike, IBM, FedEx, Absolut and half-a-dozen or two-dozen Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other brands that made hay with impactful and ubiquitous advertising.

In the modern world of marketing we've made a choice.

We ignore impact.

We choose inundation. 

We don't cook a good meal.

We serve crap by the bucket.

And we think it's good for the clients we work for.

We make a ton of small things that eventually get through because we've made forty-two million of them. We don't worry if we piss people off. Fuck 'em. We're a monopoly.

We do crap because we don't believe in power. We default to tsunami.

Nothing actually gets through to people. No one cares. Everyone just turns off. And as for agencies themselves, such practices have devalued them, their people and our entire industry.

Let's win an award!

That's all that matters.