All of Advertising Explained in One Photograph.

If you want to read a good book, maybe the best book ever about societal "brain drain" (when the smartest emigrate to escape tyranny or to find opportunity) you should pick up (like right now) Kati Marton's great book, The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World.  
Review, here. Another review pasted below.

It's about nine Jews who were all born within a few years and a few miles of each other in the Old Country. It tells what they achieved, how they got out, what Germany lost when they left, and what they did when they got to the US or the UK.

The nine were scientists, 1) Johnny von Neumann, 2) Leo Szilard, 3) Eugene Wigner and 4) Edward Teller, and artists 5) Michael Curtiz, 6) Arthur Koestler, 7) Robert Capa, 8) Alexander Korda, and 9) André Kertesz, the nominal subject of today's post.

Nothing more about escape and Hungarians, I shift now to today and the absolute trash I see everywhere in every form in every channel in every "modality," every minute.

How does this add to anything? And there are thousands like this.

The sheer utter lack of originality.  Not to mention it's emptiness. Nothingness.

Every joke, every photo, every meme, every riposte, in late-night TV, even every mockable-moment in every monologue is about the same as 200 or 2000 others.

Does anyone really think they're adding value by posting even more photos of burning LA? Or some other topic du jour, when a 17th-rate actor dies, or some fast food place adds to its menu?

What is the point of all this un-originality? 

Are so many people so needy they need to comment even though they're adding nothing to the conversation.

If Descartes were alive today, would he say 'Repetere ego sum'? I repeat, therefore, I am.

Has life, essentially, turned into having to applaud at a performance you never saw or laugh at a joke you didn't get, just so you feel like you belong?

Now to André Kertesz and the single greatest photograph ever taken. Both visually and perhaps philosophically.

Because what are we in advertising really meant to do?

Take something ordinary and make it art, give it stopping power, make people notice and think.

Do something different.

Do something no one has seen before.

Do something that says something new.
Do something that breaks through.

Lather, rinse, repeat is not a content strategy. Despite the tsunami of lather-rinse-repeat crap that floods the world.

Look, News, Wow, is our job.

Thanks, André.