All The Reasons You Read My Blog in One Post.

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, or with the remnants of what to be the advertising trade press, you'll read a lot of esoteric bushwa about this or that. 

You'll see job descriptions that may boggle your mind. Like a career in "customer pipeline management." You'll read articles about "optimizing the middle distances in the customer journey." You'll read about agencies that do bang the drum selling things I can't even understand, like this:

I've read that four times (I'm willing to do a lot of work to try to make a point) and it seems like a certain saliency is missing. Or even human-ness.

Likewise with these random inscrutables:

I don't, really I'm not playing dumb, know what any of this means. 

I see things like the examples above, they irk me, and I usually turn the page and go back to work.

I've got clients who need me and pay me and I don't like shit hanging over my head. So I work rather than perseverate or theorize.

But last night, maybe just before bed, I read something that was so obscure, abstruse and reality-loose, that it nettled me and kept me awake.

It also sparked my 97.87937749048947392745-percent photographic memory into action.

I remembered a bit from "Ogilvy on Advertising," almost verbatim. OK, 97.87937749048947392745-percent verbatim.

We are fine-tuning and optimizing and excruciating and maximizing the life out of communications. We know every trick in the book to get more "rise" out of less "run."

We've forgotten what's most important.

We know the periphery--we specialize in it.

We've forgotten the core.

We frolic in letting the data-science, or gobbledygook tail wag the love-of-neighbor dog.

We forget that we have to: 

Stop people.
Make a promise.
Deliver a smile
Impart information.
Persuade.

Or, to make it easier for you, dear reader:

In other words, and to be all Georgian-and-Rhyming about this,

Or to be all Georgian-and-Borscht-Belt about this,

Or, a little kindness with get you more customers than 17-MBA's-worth of marketing science. And the thousand thumb-nail-sized ads you're staying late to grind out in batches and buckets and blasts. Of those thousands of ads you're assaulted by, 97.87937749048947392745-percent don't even have a headline outside of 'Buy One Get One,' or some equivalent invisibility. They usually just depict stock photos of stock people with stock smiles pointing to a computer screen.

81-percent have people in impossible poses. Have you ever laid on your belly on the floor and tried to type on your laptop? It's nearly impossible. And its virulence suggests that it's the only position most people work in. Stupid as that is, the headlines are usually stupiderer.

We forget, what Ben Franklin, the inventor of lightning and kites once apocryphally said,  “A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.”

Or, for pithy's sake,

We continue to do a million uglies and hope one of those annoying pathogenic messaging sand-flies will nip someone to cah-ching effect. We don't want to think. And create one with niceness. We just want your money. No matter how much it costs to get it.

It's sad, that when we forget the truths and embrace the trends, this is what we do.