I don't believe you.

Maybe the world has always been this way and these days I'm just noticing it more. It seems that today, in the wise words of Bob Hoffman, is the"The Golden Age of Bullshit."

During a time when there is more content than ever before, there is correspondingly less accountability than ever before.
There's so much crap being propagated, so many "services" being trumpeted, so many drums being beaten, that no one has time, or the energy, to examine the truthfulness of anything.

I half feel I could create a website that says this: 

George Tannenbaum

The world's only Nobel Prize-winning copywriter

And I could get away with it. Who's gonna check? Before long people will be contacting me and either trying to get me to pay them $199 to be included into some spurious edition of "Who's Who," or asking me for advice on how they can be nominated for a similar honor.

A friend, Claudia Caplan, just sent me a putative suicide note. Claudia's despondency can be attributed to a solicitation she just received. It's on something called Evidence-Based Creative and includes not a single shred of evidence despite its name. 

Evidence-Based Creative

In a world in which media and creative are converging, "Evidence-Based Creative" is an ethos that ________applies to everything we do. This guiding principle is rooted in the notion that digital media and creative perform best when data insights inform not just media decisions but creative decisions as well. These insights should be timely, not 6 weeks post-campaign buried in a half-read wrap-report, but live, in real time where it really counts. 

Join the evidence-based creative webinar and hear from ____________l, Head of _________, on how to use a range of tools to accomplish this type of live feedback, from facial coding analysis to establish the emotional impact of video ads, to multivariate testing models offering deep audience specific insights about creative performance, to fully automated machine learning enabled Dynamic Creative Optimization making personalized messaging truly scalable.

I spent four minutes on LinkedIn just now (actually LinkedIn could be called BlurtOut) and found the following four assertions. They're sales calls, really, posing as "journalism" or worse, statements of fact.

"Why Millennial And Gen Z Employees Are Really Leaving You"

"85% of consumers made in-app purchases last year, which makes mobile integration more critical than ever. Does your brand have the right tools in place?"

"Attention all recent grads and folks updating their resumes here are some tips and tricks from yours truly!"

"Internet Marketing Company, ________, Explains the Benefits That A Community Engagement Plan Can Offer Your Small Business"

The constant inundation of statements like the above ruins people. Because they're repeated so often, and with such assertiveness, people not knowing any better start repeating them as gospel.

In an age where we can't even agree on things like measles vaccines and climate change--despite overwhelming scientific proof and overwhelming scientific consensus--we all of a sudden find ourselves being sold marketing folderol, balderdash and hokum and we're buying it.

Here are a few of the sort of baseless assertions that besiege me virtually every day.

"A more prominent logo will help our brand."

"No one reads copy anymore."

"Sending out reams of content influences people."

To quote the great philosopher, Popeye,"sez who?" In other words, when people start blathering, or pontificating, or getting up on their soap box, question everything.

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