Well, That Sucks.

I grew up with a father and an uncle who were big schmears in the ad business.

Uncle Sid owned and ran Philadelphia's largest advertising agency: Weightman Advertising. My father, Stanley, rose to Chairman of the Board of a top-15 agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt.

Accordingly, I grew up especially attuned to advertising. When we watched TV, alone or as a family, we paid attention to commercials. We also paid attention to my father's commentary on the commercials we saw on TV. What's more, the movers and the shakes in the ad business, were household names in my parents' household.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a bit of an advertising revolution that built on the creative revolution that was begun by Bill Bernbach and his legions at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Rightly or wrongly, I'll call this revolutionary adjunct the BBDO/Dusenberry Revolution. 

Its spiritual under-pinnings could be summed up with one sentence. "From a production and creative point of view, commercials should be better than the shows they interrupt."

In other words, if you're going to interrupt Mannix or Dragnet or the long-legged Angie Dickenson in my father's favorite, Police Woman, you ought to give the viewer something worth watching.

Otherwise, they'll be pissed.

BTW, most commercials on TV piss me off. 

They are played so often, they are so banal, they are so relentlessly stupid and sloppy that I think they have a depressing effect on sales. I am less likely to buy a Toyota because of that ass-wipe Jan, the Toyota lady. More likely to hate Verizon. And so on. Of course, no one cares who's pissed off anymore. Most segments of America's economy are oligarchy-controlled. Everyone is doing the same-level of crap. And sooner or later you have to replace your phone. Why bother doing anything good?

The idea that your message should not piss people off, and should be better than the messages around it if it's to get noticed is probably as old as human communication itself. 

I picture Homer among the ancient Greeks. Everyone sang songs, told stories and declaimed. Homer's lasted because they were better than others'. People like people, whether you're kibbitzing over a cuppa or presenting at work, who have something to say and say it memorably.

Dusenberry seemed to revitalize this tenet. His commercials made you notice them. They looked better than the crappy shows that held them. 

Today, of course, major brands, their agencies and the c-suite at most major corporations treat the population of the nation as an extractive industry. How much can we strip-mine out of people's asses and how little can we spend doing it.

I don't watch a lot of television, but even during expensive TV viewership times, most spots seem to be shot on video-tape left over from a Korvettes warehouse in the 1960s, shot by an amateur director with amateur actors. Everything is so bad, from the filming, to the writing, to the production, to the media plan itself, that my net-takeaway is almost always disdain.

Print--paper or digital is even worse.

Three minutes on LinkedIn will show this.

There are some American Express ads with muscle-bound construction workers and jackhammers that are so horrific they violate the 8th Amendment's restrictions on cruel and unusual punishment. The Volvo ad, above, might be even worse. And a visual with people pointing at a computer screen and grinning, or a ugly powerpoint slide as visual is not much better.

Let's review.

1. Do something interesting.
2. Be kind to your viewer.
3. Tell them something they don't know.
4. Make it fun.
5. Make it unique.

Those seem to be fairly obvious to me. Part of the social-contract. Simply, have a little respect and kindness.

I know that goes against today's prevailing Friedman-derived ethos. Maximize shareholder value while minimizing shareholder exposure.

That's why we create, celebrate and award blight.

If humans can't do better, or won't, bring on the machines.

If advertising is all about cheapness, so be it.

It'll be better for practitioners like me who still, somehow give a shit.