Vout-o-Roonee.

This fell into my feed late last week and made me laugh.

Then cry.

Because if you think about it, it's exactly what's gone wrong with modern amerika mass-production assembly-line advertising. 

We no longer strive to make creative good so people notice it. We make it ubiquitous so people run away from it at top speed and it keeps chasing.

It's Stalkertising. Not Advertising. 

Everything sucks. But damn, we're efficient.

On September 22, a client sent me a document on a platform I'd never heard of called "Loom." I might have had to register to get the document but I certainly didn't want or need another messaging platform. Since September 22, I've gotten a dozen emails from Loom. Reminding me to upgrade. Beckoning me to take a tour of my workspace. Warning me that I'd be downgraded if I didn't upgrade and upgraded if I didn't downgrade.

Not one email was remotely interesting, informative or otherwise noticeable. They were merely stalkers. Chasing me. Following me.

Not givers. Takers. Urging me to engage the way a drug pusher might.

Wednesday night, I had a facetime call with my elder daughter, S, and my two-year-old grandson, J. Facetime is a marvelous thing. It doesn't equal in-person contact, but it beats dipping my quill pen in an ink pot and writing a letter.

J, like many two-year-old boys, is heavily into cars. He can identify many different sorts of vehicles and every construction vehicle this side of a major government infrastructure boondoggle project. 

While we were speaking, J showed me various diggers and pushers and lifters and was thrilled by them all.

While J and I were talking, I remembered an old r&b song called "Cement Mixer" by the great and today unknown, Slim Gaillard. I quickly found six-minutes of Slim performing the number from a 1962 appearance on the old Steve Allen Show.

For whatever reason the YouTube downloader I usually use to remove a clip from YouTube to my hard-drive won't let me download this clip of Slim. But you really owe it to yourself to take the time to watch it. Maybe more than once.

In fact, if god forbid, I still worked with the creaking edifice of some decrepit holding company agency (count the redundancies in that single sentence) I think I'd make the video required watching.

Because Slim Gaillard is creative.

Creative.

He does what everyone else does. But makes it unique. Ownable. His.

You've seen a thousand people play keyboard before. You've never seen anyone play like Gaillard. 

Never.

Gaillard is the pithy core of what creativity and creatives are supposed to be.

Original. Funny. Unexpected. Spontaneous. Irreverent. Joyous.

Every agency in the world every three months wins a "Best Place to Work" Award as paid for and pronounced by some website you've never heard of and never read. Not a single one of them has any elements of any of the adjectives I used above.

Think about Gaillard when you check your email today and when you see 47 different subject lines from 47 different companies that read, "Spooktacular Savings," or "Our $49.99 Triple Play is all Treats, No Tricks!!!"

All the originality of asphalt in a pothole.

BTW, the world in real life wasn't big enough for Slim Gaillard. He couldn't in fact be constrained by the limits of the English Language. So he invented his own language. And as much as I love the magic of the English language, Gaillard improved it.

If you look hard enough online, you can find his Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary. You can find your own copy. You'll never use English the same way again.