Maybe Get Yourself a Second Cuppa.

Just now, I noticed a new navigational heading on the website of "The Wall Street Journal" up there with the headings I'm so used to seeing I hardly notice them anymore. But, though it's oblique, I did notice this one.

Maybe my strength as a creative person can be described as I have been describing it for nearly forty years: "I have a wide-field of vision." I see things other people don't. Whether it's a breaking pitch a moment early from the hand of a crafty moundsman, or a stray comment from a client that clarifies a brand, product or offering.

Seeing things other people seem to miss ain't entirely a blessing. For one, you're very often Vox Clamantis In Deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness. Like the Trojans thought Cassandra was crazy (she was cursed with being able to see the future and have no one believe her.) A lot of people think I'm mad, or an over-thinker, or just a freaking loon. Second, I often get annoyed with people--clients, colleagues, friends, partners--who don't have my broad "Umwelt." 

(Umwelt was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 and it comes from the German word for “environment." It is specifically the part of your surroundings that you can sense and experience—it is your perceptual world.)

In any event, soon after noticing it, I went to the Free Expression heading and found this article on the etiology or origins (and today, prevalence) of Conspiracy Theorists. 

I read it for obvious reasons. The most obvious being we now live in a country where there's no agreed upon reality, even whether or not our globe is round. To quote Shakespeare, "Foul is fair and fair is foul." And second, I wondered if there was an application to advertising from the rise of conspiracy-delusions.

The Journal's article, here, if you can squeeze past the paywall, identifies three commonalities of the conspiracy-prone mindset.

1. They are people who seek order after a traumatizing occurrence. They want a rational explanation for what seems like a random event. 

2. Believing a conspiracy theory isn’t just an odd behavior--it can become your identity. In a sense like believing the Jets will someday be in the Super Bowl, playing--strange as it seems--the Mets. 

And most reverberating,

3. Embracing a conspiracy theory gives people a sense of power. They are the ones of are manning the barricades of civilization. They're the clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

Some of the proceeding was prompted by a note I got a couple hours ago about a post I posted on Thursday. My post featured this ad. And the comment I received is below the ad:

The confluence of what hit me amid all this is this. For roughly the last half century in advertising, since the golden age turned to a darkening age, advertising has done everything BUT help answer the plaints in the ad above. We've tried every which way and every theory, gizmo, technique, ratiocination, white paper, algorithm and MBA-spouting under the sun to avoid the very purpose of advertising.

It occurred to me, we are acting, in fact, like conspiracy theorists. Conspiracists don't understand the very randomness of the advertising world, so they've created an alternative reality where only they can understand, read and interpret the metrics and the efficacy of work

1. We are trying to rationalize the trauma of new media by saying this doo-dad or that will explain it.

2. Those doing the rationalizing have created themselves an ownable identity. They are 'digital.' Or 'social.' Or 'new media people.' They've somehow deciphered and made sense of the upset of the traditional media world. They are enlightened. Those believing in brief in the ad above, 'harken back to the eighties.'

3. Finally, these theorists believe--and they've convinced millions others that they are the only clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

In fact, I read this in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, December 15.

That all led to this conclusion:

It's harrowing to read articles like the one above, with charged conclusions about the emptying of Madison Avenue stated with such firm conviction.

Especially when you read once again the "Man in Chair" ad above. None of which is even considered as a function of advertising in Rajeev Kohli's essay. (That point seems to be a painful omission, i.e. "I don't know who you are.")

When I go to the store I have no idea what makes a $9 brand different from a $6 store brand. Nobody tells me. You can look at a company like IBM, with a market-cap of $281 billion and have no idea what they even sell, much less why they're relevant. You hear endlessly about  Anthropic, or Open AI which have market caps of a quarter trillion dollars and a half trillion dollars respectively, and you have no idea how to pick one over the or what makes them different or better. Or when Campbell's Soup's own executives say they make shit food for poor people, the company doesn't even run ads to diffuse that brand and billions destroying bomb.

I know this is a lot from a stupid blog on advertising. So I'll leave you with two bits that aren't from a stupid blog on advertising and are instead from the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Czeslaw Miłosz. 

Miłosz said:

He also wrote.

Either of these, or both, should be in every agency, and read before every politician's speech every day.