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.

---

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.

Notice Anything?

One of the best things about being in advertising today is that the effort most companies and most "creatives" put into actually getting noticed is so minimal, you don't have to do much to do better than 99.99999% of everyone else.

So many people and companies post things that are bland and empty. Milton Glaser who knows a bit about getting noticed called this (lack-of)-phenomena collective recurrence. That is, when we're so used to seeing something over and over, we no longer notice it. Think in-flight announcements for fastening your seatbelt or an offer for a new credit card. Or all-cap corporate shrill-mails to do your timesheets. Has anyone, ever, listened?

When giant companies post ads like the ones below, it makes you wonder not what they were thinking, but if they were thinking. If there is anyone in their entire company that understands the hierarchy of information that for about the 200,000 years of homo sapiens' presence on earth has resulted in lucid communication.

(This is how communication works. Every communication from a dog's bark to the Gettysburg Address.)

The only hierarchy of information that makes sense.

When I started at Ogilvy back in the 1990s, there was a dying corner of the place filled with old-school practitioners who just wanted to fly under the radar and leave everyday within spitting- distance of 5:15. They used to mumble, "the secret here is not to do anything too good or too bad. If you do, you'll get noticed. And getting noticed will only get you in trouble." That's the attitude in so so many organizations from the post-office to pony express.

One night at a different agency, when I was young but already an SVP and Group Creative Head at Ally & Gargano, a client of mine got two-clicks too drunk at the client-agency Christmas party. K and I lived near each other and I was forced to get a cab and get K home. None of us wanted to picture him sleeping in the gutter or drowning in his own effluence.

K was a middle manager well-past middle-age. A decent guy, but like an old ballplayer who's lost one-step-too-many, just playing out the string. In the cab, sad and drunk, embarrassed and lonely, K confided to me.

I've spent a life sadness-proximate. A crying drunk fat client is about as bad as it gets. It's a living, breathing country-western song sung by Franz Kafka.

The failures of his career were revealed as we sped uptown in a 1988 Ford LTD. "George," K said to me, my eidetic memory engraving it in one cortex or another, "you want to know my philosophy? 'Fly low. Fly slow. And try not to crash.'"

Joseph Heller described Major Major this way in "Catch-22,"

In short, and to be as brusque as a Joe Louis round-house about it, most communication has mediocrity welcomed with open-arms. Most communication doesn't communicate because most communication doesn't get noticed.

This isn't a media issue or a platform issue. 

It's a "not-taking-the time-or-giving-the-attention-to-make-something-interesting-issue." 

Almost everything we see we don't see because we've seen it so often. 

What's worse is current marketing "best practices," remind me of that old Borscht Belt witticism.

"The food is terrible. And such small portions."

Only marketing today says:

"Our advertising is ineffective. Let's run more of it."

When I was still working in an agency other than my own, I put some of this theory to a practical test. If I got an invitation to a 2:00 meeting and I was expected to say whether or not I'd be going, I usually replied this way. "I'm over-booked and running late today. I won't be there till 2:01.30." 

That's the sort of thing that takes you from "bland" to "brand." People notice you. Half the battle in an agency.

I first figured this out the afternoon of my first baseball practice. I was just 14 and brand-new in my school. I was the youngest in my grade, and no one knew my name. I calculated something and as eager as I was to try out for and make the team, I decided to skip our first practice.

This was my logic. 

The coach would call the roll. 

He'd eventually call my name and no one would answer. He'd repeat my name. Finally he'd ask the other boys, "anybody see Tannenbaum?"

The next day I'd show up and introduce myself. At this point rather than being an anonymous aspirant, the coach knew my name. He forgave me going to see a dentist or whatever my excuse was. He might have been pissed, but I had done my job. I was on his radar. (Also I could hit.)

Below is from a spread from Paul Arden's great book, which I've been carrying around with me for a quarter of a century. Next to "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl, I've probably given copies of "It's Not How Good..." to more people than any other book.

There's a lot to learn from this spread. 

Particularly the third word in the headline:

Noticed.

Back when this photo was taken,
the lens had to stay open for quite a while to capture the complete image.

One boy ran from one side of the assemblage to the other.
He timed it so he appears twice.

It might be a dick move. I can hear my mother cursing him.
But, he won.

---

By the way, the ever-surpassing Dave Dye had an idea a few years ago. What if he went to a local cheese store in his London neighborhood, and started "tinkering" with the chalkboard so many stores put outside their doors. Could the right words, typography, design and pictures drive more traffic?

You can read about Dave's experiment here and here. Here are. a few of Dave's sketches. 

To my mind, Dave's idea should be something most marketers try. It would be great if an agency tried it as part of a new business pitch. 

Make a lot of nice things.

See what works.
Repeat.
Reap.

Take Note.

About twenty years ago, I read Walter Isaacson's book on Albert Einstein. Einstein was one of those people I had heard about my whole life, yet I knew nothing about him. I'm not talking about "knowing" his physics, but something about his development and emergence as a thinker and a scientist appealed to me. I read in Isaacson's book about Einstein's 1912 manuscript titled "On the Special Theory of Relativity."

Some time after that I was down at the Strand bookstore on 12th and Broadway (18-miles of books) and I found a copy as marked-down as a neutrino some moments after the Big Bang.

That was incentive-enough to buy it. Though down at the Strand, I seldom spend more than lunch money on a single volume, this time I went a little nuts.

My ability to comprehend Einstein is about as keen as my ability to understand an Archie comic written in Cuneiform. I can recognize works of genius, but to be honest I can make neither head nor tail of what's happening.

Nonetheless, I spent time with Einstein's book, and I discovered something.

I think there's value to be gained simply by seeing how people puzzle through problems. 

When I was a kid in grade-school and high-school math, teachers always exhorted us to "show our work." To my eyes there's something to be gained from seeing how other people reason even if you don't understand what they're reasoning toward or what it all means.

Something Zen about the journey goes here.

I think you can learn about solving just from being near people and the puzzles they have solved. You can usually spot a certain doggedness and willingness to cross things out. You can usually appreciate the sweat and ardor applied to the problem they were set on solving.

Since I stumbled upon Einstein's 1912 work, I've made a practice of buying other such facsimiles. It's not a mania. But when I see one, I check the sofa for loose change and find a way to usually buy it.

In my lap as I type this sits a moleskine-sized replica of Isaac Newton's college notebook. Again, I don't know what the hell it's doing there or why I ordered it from an esoteric publisher in the UK.

There are two more items like these sitting less-than-an-axe-length away from where I'm typing this.

Johnny von Neumann's plans that led to the first modern computer, the forerunner to the one you're likely reading this post upon.

Parenthetical on Johnny: 

And last, Alan Turing's "Mathematical Theory of ENIGMA Machine." Turing helped break the unbreakable nazi code which might have won the Allies World War II, or at least shortened its duration. This reproduction, like the von Neumann volume and the Newton book is from an English publisher called Kronecker Wallis. 

Kronecker Wallis is a wonderful and strange company. Invariably I order something twice because in my eagerness I press buttons too soon and too often. They always send me a personal note checking on me, making sure I'm not quite as dumb as I look. 

If after reading this, you order something from them, tell 'em George sent you. They'll probably give you a discount, and me, too.

BTW,

If you're interested at all in genius, you might like this book, which I enjoyed on Enrico Fermi. Having married a Jew, Fermi fled from Fascist Italy, landed at Columbia and began, really, the Manhattan Project. After Pearl Harbor, Fermi was classified as an 'enemy alien.' As such, he was not allowed to take the ferry home to New Jersey from Columbia. 

You'd think once you'd won a Nobel Prize you'd be pretty secure about your standing in the intellectual firmament. But I have a feeling physicists are just as insecure as you and I. I remembered, then found this passage. A coda to this post.