Rosy-Fingered Dawn.

If you've been at all engaged with the Odyssey beyond Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie, from it you can learn a lot of things about life. And yes, a lot of things about advertising.

I don't mean to sully one of the seminal pillars of western civilization by bringing it down to a mercantile level. But, if you consider Bernbach's dictum, that advertising ought to leverage "simple, timeless human truths," you're likely to find more of those in Homer than you will in about every commercial ever made.

Wise people fish in deep lakes of human truth. Those lakes are most often filled with epic literature--the foundational books of our world--history, movies, opera, theater and more. I know it will be a shock to some, but many human truths pre-date the gyrating sexuality of tik-tok and the latest trends. They've shown up for centuries if not, like the Odyssey, for millennia. 

Homer is rife with repetition.

Because it was composed--and sung--before it was written.

Repetition makes words easier to recall.

Women are often "white-armed," "high-breasted," "ox-eyed." 

Men are "shining," "born from Zeus," "high-hearted."

The sea is "wine-dark." 

The Morning sky "rosy-fingered dawn."

Athena is "grey-eyed." Odysseus, "sacker of cities," "cunning," "hot-headed."

There are dozens of such epithets that recur in Homer and in so much of literature and history. They made the epic easier to remember. That's what repetition does.

Some short weeks ago, I spent more time than I wish I had inside the rotting carcass of a giant (once giant-er) holding company agency. 

What struck me beyond the bloated and hackneyed creativity was how little the people there on staff knew of the ancient and perennial hallmarks of communication. The things that make words work. Things that school kids knew when I was a boy, repetition, rhyme, alliteration and phrases fractured for effect (like 'I shoulda stood in bed', or 'line up alphabetically by height') have disappeared from the arsenal of the Trophy-Seeking class. In other words, they've thrown out, or never knew those linchpins that unlock memory and "stickiness." 

I'd bet dollars to donuts (a phrase that no longer makes sense because donuts, today, cost more than a dollar) simple precepts like using mnemonics are simply no longer even considered.

In short the industry has been so avid about chasing the "latest" that we no longer bother with the permanent.

Of all the modern economic reasons behind the collapse of advertising, of all the financial legerdemain that has pillaged the business and rendered it a crappy career, the most pernicious element of our own self-immolation is that today we study flourish not foundations. We decided it's better to decorate a brand than define a brand.

Ergo our destruction.

We think about what will impress judges for twenty minutes rather than what will influence buyers for twenty years.

We're stuck two rosy fingered fingers up the ass of common-sense and considered that salutary.

That's why so many people, clients and formed ad-people have given the industry the (rosy) finger.