Better Shred than Bleah.

An Oedipal commercial.
(Like Oeddie, you'll want to gouge out your own eyes.)

You can hardly go on LinkedIn, or read some press-release blather from some company or another, or view about 12-seconds of a commercial (that's about all you can bear) they did that they're naturally gushing over without saying to yourself, "how much suck can the world actually tolerate?" This isn't a question of human-made versus man-made. Humans can and do make slop almost as well as machines. And humans are cheaper, too. But the point is, in an effort to get us to shop till we drop, amerikrap's marketers are feeding us "slop till we plotz."

What's more, it seems like every third ad on LinkedIn is for some mini-MBA or an advanced degree for CMO, or for some sort of executive MBA program. To be honest, there was a time in my career, when I was in my 40s, that I was trying to get Ogilvy to help pay for my executive MBA. I saw the death of the ad industry coming, and thought I might have a few sentient years left to make some real money trying to work for Goldman-Sachs.

The point is having dealt with clients my entire life, 99.8-percent of them would be better off if they spent 12 minutes with me and got instead of an MBA, their GMT (george-michael-training.)

I would hold only two classes.

The first would take one-minute and would require you to just memorize a single sentence: "Never work for a company that schedules 30-minute meetings." More and more companies do this and it says four things about them.

1. They're so self-important they have no time for humanity, cordiality and kibbitzing. They can only agenda. They can't think about anything, really, but getting to their next meeting on time.

2. They have way too many meetings altogether. The only positive of a 30-minute meeting is that you can cram twenty into a normal workday.

3. They aren't really open to ideas--just preconceived notions. 30-minutes is really too short to have a legitimate back-and-forth discussion, disagreement and resolution.

4. The number of meetings is more important than the content of meetings. That's why they've arranged a way to have so many.

-

The second part of my GMT curriculum wouldn't take much longer than part one.

It would require a shredder, a couple of pieces of paper and another short memorization exercise.

"99.8-percent of all people don't like being interrupted. They don't like you. They don't like your brand. They don't believe your offers. They don't like your mix. They don't like your casting. They don't like your music. They don't like your sense of humor. They don't believe you're truthful. And they've seen it all before."

Then do what I did in this video. (That paper labeled "JUNK" could be any marketing message, customer-facing, internal, paid, owned, earned. Whatevs.)

I'm 99.8-percent sure no marketing education program in the world teaches their students how people really feel about the generalized crappiness disorder that afflicts most advertising.  This video would help. So would the photo below. 

A month's-worth of shredded direct mail.

I know you can't teach taste.

But you can teach a simple sentence.

If you don't make people laugh, or feel, or think, your work will be shredded.

How most people treat most messages.

A month's worth of credit card, telco, landscaping and roofing offers.
(A fore-shadowing.)