American Amnesia.

Marty Puris, one of the greatest ad-people ever, has a new mission that goes beyond selling BMWs, UPS, Club Med and the other vital brands he built as co-head of his eponymous agency, Ammirati & Puris. 

Puris, who when I was a cub I would have given my left penis to work for, has founded an organization called "America, the Possible."

As much as I've rewritten Shakespeare, Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Orwell, I haven't the temerity to re-write Puris. So, I'll let him tell you what he's up to. And then I'll get to the point of today's post.

I bring up Puris' work in this humble blog on advertising, because I believe in metaphor. Metaphors allow us to understand something we don't know about by comparing it to something we do know about, or something we can imagine. Metaphors also help us make our language vivid and memorable. 

For instance, Holden Caulfield in Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," didn't say it was cold standing on a hill at Pencey watching a football game. He said it this way:

Likewise, for more than a quarter of a century, Johnny Carson would say, "It was hot out today." His audience would respond, "how hot was it?" And Carson would oblige with metaphor, and usually a laugh line.

I wonder, if Puris' point about so many millions of Americans forgetting what it means to be American can be extrapolated to advertising. I wonder if, in Puris' words, we've become the marketing equivalent of "civically illiterate and chronically disengaged." Or worse--afflicted with know-it-all hubris.

That's the metaphor I see.

I wonder if in our societal lust for guaranteed solutions, our infatuation with the (over)-promise of technology, and our placing of pseudo-scientific marketing up on a pedestal, we have, as an industry and as individual practitioners of advertising forgotten the basics of what makes advertising work. What made it an important, attractive industry. What made it one of the great forces of the greatest economy that ever was.

Earlier this morning I was looking through my hard-drive for an idea for a blog post.

It's Sunday as I write this, and I had written already two posts for the week ahead and I wanted a third to take myself from behind the week's blogging 8-ball. (I've written already 7,100 posts, but I still have to work to find 7,101 and 7,102 and so on.)

I went looking for an old VW brochure I had saved somewhere. I thought it might make a nice topic for a post. 

I couldn't find it. But somehow I tripped into this fairly amazing rabbit hole.

As a person who loves cars, and who wants a new one, I spend a decent amount of time looking at the websites of automotive brands. Or should I say "blands." Here are screen shots of what I would consider six of the "sexiest" auto-brands in the US.

Here are a dozen or so pages from automotive brochures that are older than you are. 

To Puris' point about the wasting away of America's democratic glue, it's hard to know why we left what we were doing for what we're now doing. Hard to know why we left what worked and embraced the insipid.

Just as Puris asks if we've forgotten what America is about, I'm asking if we've forgotten what advertising is about. If we've forgotten the importance of advertising. The power of advertising. The love of advertising for the product we are charged with selling.

Have we forgotten, or ignored, or been MBA'd and AI'd away from doing the things advertising used to do--had to do: create desire. Differentiate. Make sexy. Define. Demonstrate. Detail. Design.

Have we as advertising professionals forgotten, as Puris believes America has forgotten? 

I believe so.

I believe if we don't do anything about it, we die.