Nice Is a Vice.

“When you ask narrative to always deliver a sanitized product — a pleasant evening, a happy outcome, a fun spectacle — you’re asking it to lie.” — Samuel D. Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

“You looked around television in those years, and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out’; ‘the boss is coming to dinner, and the roast’s ruined.’ The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.”  — Norman Lear, writer, producer

How could anyone, even someone with my Promethean resilience, write a blog or anything else for that matter, for more than nineteen years without missing a day. This is post 7,450, or thereabout, and somehow, even though I write about a subject as dopey as advertising, I still find something to stay. Somehow, I still keep my thousands of daily readers entertained enough so that they keep coming back.

The reason to my mind is simple. I don't really write about advertising. I write about life and relate it back to advertising. Our business is tiny and dying. But, in many ways, it serves as an apt metaphor for so much of what's going on in the world. It can serve as a micro example of macro trends.

What's set me off on today's post was an essay by Samuel D. Hunter (cited above) that I read early this morning in the New York Times. Hunter is writing about theatre and art, but to my eyes, and with a little imagination he could be talking about many of the commercials the ad industry produces and our industry's propensity to show happy people and smiling faces--regardless of the world's reality.

Hunter's piece, "In Defense of Sad Plays" could easily be rewritten as "In Defense of Real Life," or reductio ad absurdam, "In Defense of Real Commercials." You can read Hunter's essay here.

Today, Hunter writes, with all the world's cacophony barking incessantly at us people ask, "can we just get some relief? Do we really have to sit with more pain? And at these ticket prices? Can’t we just offer a nice evening at the theater?"

I've heard essentially the same from every client in nearly every agency I've worked. Who wants to show a cramped airline seat? Seafood triplets that aren't steaming hot and food styled? An SUV stuck in traffic. A pharma product where the side effects that take up 67-percent of the commercial are actually shown?  

Who wants to show a telco commercial with dropped calls and a confusing bill. Or a cable company who keeps you waiting for days--after sitting hours on a phone tree. Who wants to depict a bank raking in $14,000,000,000 in quarterly-profits but unable to pick up the phone.

The examples are endless.

However, they can all be summed up with this sentence. "Who wants to show reality when reality is so often so disappointing?"

Rather than address reality, we show lies.
Lies like smiling fast food workers, or clean grocery stores. Lies like attentive politicians. Or red ripe tomatoes.

All we're left with are lies.
The divorce between the reality depicted and the reality our viewers live.
That separation has been egregious in advertising for a long time. It's becoming more and more egregious in politics today. That might be why 'things fall apart.'

Hunter concludes his short essay this way. "Arthur Miller was quick to dispel a common misconception that is still alive today: that 'tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.'"

Hunter doesn't buy that indictment of tragedy
. He says "Tragic characters represent hope. They push through the darkness, even at their own peril. What’s more optimistic than believing that, through suffering, one can achieve grace and redemption?"

Of the many assaults perpetrated against our industry, the most powerful might be "happy-itis." Or "that might upset someone in a focus-group." Or "no one wants to see reality."

Our industry's happy-itis has resulted in an industry that is constantly lying. An industry no one believes because our industry shows nothing that is real--or even approaches reality.

The examples are too numerous to mention. 

But I'll leave you with this one. And no more.

I'm a nice guy.