Boring. Not Boring.

It's pretty easy to find writing that sucks.

Most of what we're blitzed with is either machine-made with about the care put into a slice of past use-by-date "processed cheese food" or is so put through the 17-rounds-of-approval wringer that at worst it's insulting and at best it's just bland an anodyne. Or it's--maybe most egregious--MBA-vetted.

Here's one small example:

When else would you fasten your seat belt except when you're seated?

Early Monday morning as I sat down to write, however, I stumbled upon some writing that was really, truly delightful.

Oddly enough, the writing was found on the website of a self-propelled-boat-race that goes from Washington state north 750-miles to Ketchikan, Alaska.

Here's a bit of copy that made me laugh.

That made me think for a second (or half a second) maybe I should try this. And no, I don't need the steak knives.

The highlight of the site, besides the race itself, was the writing on the site. Particularly wonderful were how they handled their frequently asked questions.

By the way, some years ago, The Economist turned FAQs on their ears, though FAQs don't have ears. They came out with this book, which you can't buy even on amazon or abebooks.com. It's currently out-of-print. The example question below might explain that scarcity. I have two copies, and no, you can't borrow one.

Q.
Has recycling gone too far? Research is now underway that would allow recyclers to turn:
A. Dead fish into disposable diapers
B. Sewage into pillow stuffing
C. Liposuctioned human fat into soap

A.
And the answer is (a)

Babies, beware: food scientist Srinivasan Damodaran knows how to make an eco-friendly filler for disposable diapers out of "bycatch", the nearly 20 million tons of fish caught each year that is unsuitable for sale. Dr. Damodaran extracts protein from the fish and then treats it with a chemical known as EDTAD that lends it superb absorbency. Only a few squeamish parents stand in the way of an environmental triumph. (The Economist, 7 Dec 2000)

But back to the R2AK race.

You can, and should, look at their Frequently Asked Questions here. I've pasted a few bits here to whet your inquisitive appetite.

Frequently Asked Questions, like most things you might have to write and most things you might have to read, can go either one of two ways.

Most people look at them as garbage and treat them with very little care. They usually wind up therefore being dull, illegible and ignored.

That's why about 99.7876992% of what we see is dull, illegible and ignored. Yeah, and in-scope.

I never really thought about FAQs at all until I saw The Economist book. Then, a few years ago, the New York Times got in on the act with an FAQ on the wedding of two people I don't give a rat's ass about. You can see it here.

The Times did subsequent variations on a theme around the 2023 Super Bowl, here. And the birth of the royal baby, here.

When I taught at School of Visual Arts in New York in the early 1990s, my students would often accuse me of giving them "boring assignments."

I said to them something like "The two greatest advertising successes of the 1980s were the New York yellow pages and a package delivery company. You couldn't get more-boring assignments."

The accountants and consultants who have destroyed the advertising business, who have spreadsheeted it into irrelevance and who have optimized its enshittification don't understand the most Bernbach-ian of Howard Gossage's truths.

Our job is making things interesting.
No matter what.

There are no boring products.
Only boring ways of doing your job.

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BTW,
all the au courant blather about making a brand a "part of culture" emanates from advertising dilettantes who believe there's nothing interesting about the products they're paid to advertise so they gussy those products up with purported cultural relevance.

I've seen catchphrases and the like migrate from TV commercials, or even print, into popular parlance and that's a bonus when it happens--but usually a serendipity-based bonus, not one you can engineer or plan for.

I'm not really sure what it means to make a brand a part of culture. I don't need a mayonnaise-derived cultural condiment or a phone service that spends more on bad celebrity-schtick than they do on customer-care.

In my opinion, culture became a barometer for advertising "awardiness" because so many practitioners of modern advertising actually hate advertising. Further they hate, or haven't even used the products they're charged with selling. Rather than deepen their knowledge, they assert that no one cares about products or product differentiation or the essential make-up of the products we buy.

To me, culture is a crutch, like trying to out-adjective others in your category. Culture, like florid language, can't be the exclusive province of a particular brand. What happens then, because no one any more talks about the really differences in products, is that most categories follow the same cultural playbook and everything in that category looks exactly the same and says exactly nothing.

Replicable emptiness.