Swing and a Miss.

When I was just fourteen and playing varsity baseball for a purportedly elite private high school situated on a triangle between two interstate highways and a crappy mall built on marshland, there was a player on the team--he was a junior when I was a freshman--called Joe Tartaglia.

Though I scarcely talked to him when we were team-mates and though I can safely say I never ever had a substantive conversation with Joe, I think about him with some frequency.

Joe Tartaglia had the single best baseball swing I have ever in my life seen. That includes looking at vintage footage on YouTube of Ted Williams or Stan Musial or Frank Robinson. Whenever one of our coaches needed to demonstrate exemplary batting form, they'd blow their meathead whistles and scream at the assembled, "Takalookat Joe. Joe, swing atta couple."

What made Joe a better metaphor than a ball player is that I can't honestly think of one time I remember him actually making contact with the ball. He had a perfect swing but he always missed the mark.

It's been said by many of the world's legion of horsehide cognoscenti that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the hardest task in sport. And Joe seemed to prove that.

Sunday night I flew in from Phoenix to Boston on an American Airlines flight that was due to land at midnight and instead landed at one a.m. Though my wife and I flew business class, the service on-board was as brusque and surly, as we've come to expect. 

That experience brought to mind Joe Tartaglia.

Just as there is a huge gap between having a beautiful swing and having the ability to drive a ball with regularity, the world's practitioners of advertising seem to have forgotten that there is a vast difference between "branding" and a brand.

My American Airlines plane was well-branded. The flight attendants' uniforms were well-branded. The inflight materials, the canned "safety" announcements and canned inducements to sign up for American Airlines Sky Miles all we're well-designed and up-to-guidelines. If the brand police were aboard, the flying aluminum cylinder of germs and filthy bathrooms and lethargic personnel would have gotten high-grades.

The branding was good.

The upholding the values, standards and meaning of the brand was a swing and a miss. As we used to rag, "y'swing likea rusty gate."

Just as a good-looking swing is different from being a good hitter, most marketing people fail to understand that good branding does not make a good brand. Somehow as an industry, we've chosen to focus on the ephemeral, decorative aspects of being a brand and chosen to neglect the material and functional meaning of being a brand. Worse, we fail to consider the damage to the value of the brand that results from the subject-object split between how the brand looks and how the brand works.

Looks good/works bad is even more dangerous than looks bad/works bad. Because it's more disappointing. 

In the social media ad world as displayed daily by a thousand chimer-inners on LinkedIn and other social platforms, more and more people seem to be applauding more and more ads that are all show and no substance. They're not real. They're not newsy. They're not honest. And they're usually not based on anything other than shocking the viewer, thereby gaining talk value and awards-show-currency, aka notoriety.

These ads below, which have for the past week clogged my feeds like pubic hair in a boys' locker room shower-drain hurt our industry and the clients we purport to serve.

They're not only false they encourage a false narrative. 

It's time we got back to not looking good while striking out. But looking good while hitting the ball.

That takes two things.

1. Work based on a human insight.
2. Honesty.

PS. If you see a mother eating a fast food burger while nursing her baby, don't notify the judges at Cannes. Notify child protective services.