I was talking to a fellow copywriter and somehow Dizzy Dean, the great pitcher for the 1930s St. Louis Cardinals "Gas House Gang" came up. That led me to look online and find some quotations by Dean. This one really struck me:
"The dumber a pitcher is, the better. When he gets smart and tries to experiment with a lot of different pitches, he's in trouble. All I ever had was a fastball, a curve and a change up and I did pretty good."
It occurred to me when I read that quote that Dean could be talking about advertising as well as pitching. We are good as an industry when we don't get too smart, too clever, too crafty. When we're simple, honest, direct. We are good when, simply put, we are entertaining, interesting, human and real.
When we get all crazy about things, when we talk about modalities and new models and game-changing paradigms, we are, in the words of Dean, "get[ting] smart." Or too smart.
That's no good.
