Talking about the effects of advertising.Geeks and Toadies.
There it is. Here in a book on advertising in America, caught up within a serious discussion about the effects that advertising supposedly has on you, me, and the rest of society ... the first words are "Geeks and Toadies."
It feels right, though. Seems natural. And naturally, there's a reason for this (editors keep demanding reasons for these words and the order in which they appear). To my mind, the development of the Geek and Toady career paths in the carnivals and traveling snake-oil shows around the turn of the century not only heralded the very beginning of modern advertising in America, but they also provide the perfect model for thinking about the idea of advertising having some serious effects on people's behavior. To paraphrase the hair coloring commercial ... Does it? Or doesn't it?
This is the section of the book that's going to talk about the effects of the media, and especially, advertising.
First, let's take ourselves out for a walk, back around late June, 1890. The night's a comfortable summer thing, dark as nights tend to be but gently lit by a leering moon. The air is light with no real humidity, and you've got one of your best friends in the world hanging with you. Clyde.
There's an animal smell to this small town of ours. It's the smell of horses that we've grown up with and don't smell anymore 'cause that's the way of the world; the smell of the plowed earth that comes to hunker down on you for a few seconds during the spring and then takes off again; the actual smell of the plants in the woods and the riverbed as they grow. Sensual stuff.
Oh, yeah. You and Clyde are both about twelve. No school this time of year, and bigod, the carnival's just hit town. Right now, you and Clyde are standing at the edge of this traveling other-world of dark tents, and it isn't quite like a fantastic circus because this has the carnival's benefit of promising much more in the way of evil and terror and other interesting stuff. Stuff you look hard for as each of you go lurking in the shadows between the tents, the hanging geegaws in the empty spaces, and the sideshows that come to fill the emptiness.
Lanterns hiss and toss light too carelessly to illuminate the dark corners of the tents. The carnies are spittin', gruntin' and scratchin', men and women both. Damp straw covers the wide dirt walkways. A forever familiar smell. You hear two carnies arguing, a man and a woman, and you've never heard half of those words they're spewing at each other so you figure they've got to be dirty. You try to remember a few for later in the year, at school.
A Barker begins hollering over to your left, partially hidden behind a tent flap. He's making one hell of a lot of noise, and he's got some serious excitement rolling around in the words he's yelling, so you and Clyde make your way on over to the tent front.
And there he is. Right in front of the Midget Dog-Faced Bearded Woman's tent.
The Geek.
Oh, this is too wonderful. You've heard about this kind of guy but you never imagined you'd actually see ... he's got a box at his feet. About the size of the large orange and yellow bread box your mother has at home and the Barker's yelling, getting more people up front and he's talking all about what the Geek's about to do and more and more people are coming up and crowding tight because of what they hear is about to happen and you get scared because it seems everyone in town has been mysteriously pulled to this one place and you look around for mom and dad because they had to have heard about what's going to happen here and just when the Barker seems about to run out of breath the Geek reaches casually over into the large bread box and pulls out a Rhode Island Red chicken and sticks the bird's head into his mouth and bites it off with a horrible snarl.
He spews the chicken's head at your feet and grins at you. One eye rolls in the Geek's head, without purpose.
Yow. Time to run. This is just too weird. So, with eyes bugging out of your head in seriously twisted excitement, you huff a noise at Clyde and he nods in fearful understanding and the two of you take off for the dark spaces between the trees to the outside of the carnytown that's just gotten too strange to stay in.
In the woods, the two of you bend over, hands on your knees, breathing deep not from the run, but from this thing that's just happened to you and sharing it with each other and the deep-gut knowing that you've just had a mysterious adventure that's going to form the rest of your life, and right after thinking to yourself that that Geek is going to have a hard time explaining how he made a living as a young man to his grandchildren in later years ... right then you hear the sound of a loud and commanding voice booming through the trees, coming from the small clearing in the woods next to the stream where you and Clyde have been spending your summer days fishing.
You wander on over to take a look.
And you get introduced to a Toady for the first time in your life. But unfortunately, it won't be the last time.
Right next to the stream, at the edge of the clearing, about twenty people are gathered at the back of a wagon that's got a sign on it reading, "Doctor Wildridge's Traveling Medicine Show and Death Challenge." You want to remember every small bit of this so you and Clyde can talk about it all summer and you can amaze your friends at school because you were there for the Death Challenge, but you discover that you don't have to make any particular effort to remember. You do a quick memory check, and you realize that everything is so new and different, it all violates so damned much of what you know and expect to be true and possible in life ... it's all so ... creative ... you find even the small details like the two green-painted lanterns hanging from the poles at the back of the wagon, casting strange light from above on Doctor Wildridge's brows and darkening the sockets of his eyes like a skeleton ... all of it's burned deep into your memory already.
The Doctor's voice booms in command-authority and believability. He's holding this bottle of liquid in one hand and a small toad in the other. He's challenging the audience.
But wait a minute. Is he ... he's asking for someone to come up ... come up and for five dollars ... swallow that damned toad. No, no, no. You don't do that! Hell, this is 1892. We know how things work. We got a civilized handle on reality. We've even got science! Toads'll kill you if you swallow 'em. Everyone knows that. You look at Clyde and his eyes suddenly get real big and you turn to look back at the crowd and there's this kid about three years older than you and Clyde, not anyone you know from town, and he's walking up ... climbing up on the back of the wagon next to The Doctor.
The kid holds his hand out. The Doctor smiles and places the toad in the kid's hand. The kid holds out his other hand. The Doctor frowns and places a fiver in the kid's free hand. The kid looks at the crowd serious-like, and with more bravery than you ever saw in your own dad, he takes the toad into his mouth and swallows the damned thing.
Sure death. Everyone knows that. The whole crowd takes in a single breath and is fearful of letting it go, like it might be their last, like they might die with the kid.
And immediately, the kid begins staggering, clutching at his throat, choking and gasping desperately for air. The Doctor rushes to his side as the kid drops to his knees and begins falling backwards. The Doctor pours the golden liquid from the bottle of Doctor Wildridge's Traveling Medicine Show and Death Challenge Potion into the kid's open mouth. The kid gives a sudden shiver, then goes still. The Doctor is stunned. He lowers the kid's body to the deck of the wagon, and looks at the crowd, lost.
The kid's body twitches. Someone in the crowd sees a foot kick a little and yells out. Then the kid's whole body begins to twitch lightly, then move slowly. And sure enough, the kid's eyes come open and he looks at the crowd, then up at The Doctor, gratefully.
The crowd screams approval and The Doctor begins selling the bottles of liquid that not only will save your life if you swallow a toad, but will cure your anxiety, heal that bunion, and, with daily doses, extend your life beyond your wildest expectations. And keep your sex drive kicking long beyond even that.
There has never been a night as wonderful as this in anybody's life.
A Geek biting the head off a live chicken.
A kid taking the Death Challenge and eating a toad and dying right in front of your own damned eyes. And being resurrected right in front of your own damned eyes.
And then, right in front of your own damned eyes, you see a small movement in the grass just under the wagon. You creep closer and when you get close enough, you see the toad the kid had pawned in his hand and secretly tossed through a cut hole in the wagon's floorboards after he'd faked eating it.
You've just seen how it all works with a Toady and ToadMaster. Lies. Enticement to believe. Anything for a buck, or approval. And it works.
The effects of advertising. Are they there?
A romanticized look at two forms of advertising: the Geek, attracting attention from a crowd that's expecting a performance the likes of which they've never seen before in their lives ... and the Toad-Eater, or the Toady, accomplice to the ToadMaster in selling a product under false pretenses.
Which is the truth? Does advertising just kind of get people's attention and nudge them a bit to think about things in a certain way? Or does advertising actually cause them to buy things, some of which might not be good for them to buy? Let's go back to the Geek and Toady for a second.
The Geek was used by other people to accomplish their ends. He simply did what he was asked ... attract attention as best he could. There was no room in his mind to bother with lies. And most advertisers are generally just a bunch of decent well-meaning Geeks, biting heads off marketing problems, trying to be creative in what they spit out at the audience, and somehow earn that almighty buck that'll keep them going till the next head to sever with their teeth comes along. Mostly, they recognize that all they can do is announce a product or service in a somewhat interesting way, and hope the presentation's compelling enough to get people to at least entertain the idea of the potential value of that product or service in their own lives.
Can't force 'em to buy stuff.
In contrast, the Toady and ToadMaster are slimed with malice and distrust, a willingness to do damned near anything to twist someone's thinking. A ToadMaster is fully capable of all the necessary lies that will advance his own fortunes ... perfectly represented by the current crop of folks who make up the questionable side of the profession of advertising. Used car salesmen. Political hacks and other advertising creeps. Term insurance sales companies feeding on the fear of older people. Public relations words of comfort from the corporation that the recent ecological disaster wasn't all that bad and it'll be cleaned up in short order. Emotional terrorists, in short. People who should be sent to live a long life with a team of lawyers.
And then, most importantly, there's the audience ... you … me ... the people out there at all levels of that economic ladder (advertising is The Great Equalizer for information ... no matter how poor you are, you're going to see that ad on TV for the telephone company at the same time the rich man in his castle sees it) who've been exposed to advertising all our lives. And now, even the extremely false and deceptive ToadMaster-advertising can't sell snake oil to people who don't need it. Can't sell unwanted cars (anyone need a Yugo?). Can't sell unwanted computers (anyone want to buy an Osbourne computer?).
We're an advertising-wise (and advertising-weary) society, and in general, we can smell any lack of respect and insincerity that might appear inside that cathode ray tube that lights up the dark of our living room at night with flashing colors. And when we see the lies, when the insincerity becomes too extreme for even the cynic in us ... that's when we go to the kitchen to get another beer and we blow off that commercial blaring in the living room.
The thing is ... most all of us in this life, advertising and otherwise, are really just harmless Geeks. We're all just pitching for someone or something. Whether it's a once-living Mother Teresa trying to raise funds for the starving. Whether it's Procter & Gamble trying to sell us toothpaste. Whether it's me putting on my favorite paisley shirt in the mistaken impression that it's going to impress the hell out of the woman in Apt. 3C. We're all just pitchin' someway, somehow.
Bucking the system.
It should be mentioned at this point that there are a number of seriously educated professors of advertising, marketing, journalism, or communication, and an utterly huge number of advertising professionals who will all argue that Geeks and Toadies do not represent the origin-point of the fine tradition of American advertising.
These highly qualified people will point to a proud history of advertising running back to within a few years of the invention of the printing press. They'll show you crumbling illustrations of political handbills from the Revolutionary era and call that advertising. They'll show you pages from early newspapers where someone was trying to recover "stolen goods, the return of two anvils," and real estate for sale. They'll show you catalogs from around the Civil War era that certainly look like advertising. They're all wrong, of course.
I deliberately chose the Geeks and Toadies as origin-points for advertising's current form because the Geek and Toady era was a time when modern advertising was just beginning to take on the God-all idea of everything ... the notion of "concept."
Concept. The Geeks and Toadies were not mere announcements of products or services ... these people were actual concepts in advertising, concepts that pointed to the issue in a new way, entertained as they did so, and sold a product or service through audience involvement. That is in no way a full or wholly accurate definition of "concept," but it should show how the advertising that the Geek and Toady were doing took on a form significantly different from handbills, newspaper ads for horses, and catalogs.
What's wrong with the biz is that
they've forgotten who they are.Advertising spending nowadays (2004) is about $265,000,000,000 (that's $265 billion in the U.S. alone ... look at how close this is to the Defense Department's 2004 budget of about $380 billion, and that includes a war in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, bullets, salaries, uniforms, gas and diesel fuel, other bases and posts across this and other countries ... the whole damned thing).
We spend about a quarter-trillion dollars per-year in a marvelous exercise in grand silliness. Advertising's an establishment of amazing wealth and power with a history its professionals can live with, even if they find themselves having a hard time calling used car salesmen one of their own.
For all its supposed emphasis on creativity, the business is really more a successful exercise in building an establishment. The profession is deeply established in our culture, it has its associations, codes of conduct, awards ceremonies, a special class of First Amendment law built just around advertising, and, if one judges by the amount of research performed on it, you'd get the idea that advertising actually can be studied as a science, thus giving it even more social credibility.
And here is where the trouble with the business and culture of advertising begins ... as much as we in the biz say we give credit to the public for the ability to make their own decisions, and as much as we pay lip service to words that elevate those folks out there up to our own informed level of reasoned thought, we in the biz are not the consumers. Dear god, no. You never hear an ad pro referring to him or herself as a "target," which is what we call all of you of the Great-Unwashed-by-Lever-2000 and Levi-clad. You, the consumer.
You, are the target. You have a bull's-eye painted square on the middle of your forehead and it's connected somehow to the reptilian part of your mind which makes you act instinctively and when you buy something after we've advertised it ... well, that's when the marketing folks step in and claim this business is a science.
And truthfully, we on the creative side like to think we did a damned fine job, too. But anyone with half a mind, most of us Geeks, get real uncomfortable when it's said that we actually caused the purchase.
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A Question of Common Sense #3:
Does advertising work?
There are a lot of people who think advertising sets up some form of stimulus-response reaction. See an ad. Buy the thing. These people would seem to be those who buy into the "victim" mentality. We're all victims of society, and its evils. People are forced by advertising to buy things they don't really want of need. Victim-think. But it's not that way.
I get up in front of my advertising classes and ask them a simple question. "Hey," I say, "Can any of you remember the last TV spot you saw?" Maybe one hand in 20 goes up. Now, simply because people can't remember the last TV spot they saw doesn't necessarily mean they have not been affected by the commercial. But common-sense-wise, it does make you wonder.
"So, hey," I go on, "What spots do you remember?" And they go on to mention the ones which entertain. You never hear people talk about the Lever's soap spot. You never hear anyone talk about a used car spot. But you do hear them talk about the spots that entertained them. For a while, it was the "Dream Garage" spot that TBWA Chiat/Day put together for Nissan, where the young kid hits a baseball into a barn, follows it and falls down into a shaft to a dream garage where classic Nissan cars are stored by the Japanese Mr. K. And there were the Levi spots with the kid being wheeled into an operating room and everyone gets set off by the tune, "Tainted Love," doctors are dancing and the kid's heart stops. And there was the Levis spot that aired during the 2004 Super Bowl featuring a incredible young couple walking a desert-city streets, with a huge herd of buffalo coming down the asphalt toward them in full stampede.
But the truth is, now, toward the start of this millennium, the hands go up more slowly. There are fewer of them. And the voices used to tell of the spot remembered are soft and hesitant. Advertising has become really bad these days.
Does advertising make you buy things? Here's where it gets weird. Pose the question to the ad copywriting class on Monday, and you get 80 percent saying, yeah, you bet your ass it does. Pose it to the Tuesday class and 80 percent say no way, not even, and Charlie in the far corner mutters, "Nevermore." Hard to make sense of it. But ask them the last time they got out of their chair and went to buy a Coke when they saw a Coke ad, and no hand goes up. Okay, so much for instant response. How about delayed response, where the ads are supposed build up, accumulate in their influence over time? Ask when was the last time they were buying fast food and they made their drink decision based on a commercial they'd seen. Not a hand goes up.
When they think about it, these students think far better than a lot of so-called scholars and victim-think lawyers ... ads really have little to do with what they do in their real lives.
Now, some statistician out there is throwing some major hissy-fit because none of the above is statistically valid research. Well, that's right. But it does make some good common sense.
Then another researcher is going to say, "Hey, you shouldn't be looking for direct, immediate effects. The real effects are more subtle. Something that happens over a long period of time." And this person has my respect. Because this is a smart observation, and I've already mentioned it.
It's something some people call "drip theory." The idea that the longer you're exposed to a drizzle of rain, the wetter you become. It seems to make common sense. The more you get exposed to advertising, the greater the effect it has on you. It starts out minuscule, but then, after time, has more impact.
But there's a problem. Common sense shows that the idea is flawed. Men, you've all been exposed to as many commercials for Gillette as with Schick, so you should be just as "wet" from the advertising from both. But you choose one over the other without any trouble. And women, you've likely seen more "Secret" commercials than any other and should be so "wet" with their message that you have no choice in what you choose to put under your arms. But a large number of you do not choose Secret deodorant/antiperspirant.
So, what works? Does advertising work? We'll get into that more, later.
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If advertising does have an effect on people,
then the biz has a social responsibility.This whole question about the effects of advertising is about much more than whether it got you to choose a Twinkie instead of a Twix. Think about it -- if advertising really can change people's behaviors, then advertising has a global responsibility to help solve some of the problems we as a nation, and the rest of the world face.
The rest of this chapter is going to talk about advertising's role in our world. Because if there are effects that we can expect from advertising, it is rightful to expect the advertising community to begin taking up more of the social issues we're all struggling with, and try to help solve them.
But all that depends on how much power we attribute to the advertising we see. Understand this ... if advertising has little real effect, all the TV and magazine and Internet advertising against kids smoking isn't going to make a dent in the problem, and we're misplacing our hopes and responsibility by expecting advertising to change those kids' behavior. We're failing this nation's children because we mistakenly believe too deeply in advertising's effects.
In 1998, President Clinton signed over money to create and run advertising aimed at trying to get kids to stop smoking. If advertising doesn't have any effect on stopping that smoking ... all the good that all those millions of dollars could have done otherwise in peer counseling, support groups and the rest... it's all a waste.
This question about the effects of advertising is no minor thing. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used in thousands of other ways is being signed over to create advertising that may not have a chance in hell of doing anything because the politicians just assume the effects will be there.
Scary, actually. To see them act so stupidly. Unquestioningly.
But if we can reasonably expect, not just assume that advertising has an effect, there is a world waiting for it to help it accomplish great things. But first, let's get back to the concern with how advertising is pretty much not impressing most of us as it stands.
Creativity is too rare.
Rather than developing advertising that has value and meaning to us folks, the ad business has just been mucking about in a business-as-usual straight jacket in an industry that is instead paid to come up with the unusual. The advertising industry has, in general, abandoned the sense of creativity that made it the innovative force it should be by definition. With a few exceptions, it seems to have lost the courage to produce new ideas that will shock, or surprise, or entertain; and it has forgotten how to meaningfully touch the audience it is supposed to be able to talk to better than anyone in the world.
As you survey the advertising landscape in 2004, you find a lot less creative work than in 1996. Hard and scary times make people afraid to be creative, and businesses just want to be very direct about telling you they want your dollar. The talent to create great work is still out there. Pent up. It's the very caution of the business leaders that's producing noncompetitive advertising.
The ad business is eating Jell-O, rather than biting off chicken heads.
When was the last time you were on the sofa and found yourself pointing at the TV, and asking the person you're making love to, "Hey. Did you see that?"
Every TV spot should be that compelling.
But what we do see is almost enough to make you actually turn away from your TV for a minute. Almost.
Time to get on with things.
Time to get on to the end of the world.Where all this is leading is that the push to create greater advertising is becoming a moral responsibility, not just an economic incentive.
A series of horrific events in our societies worldwide are no longer anomalies, but have taken on a sense of the everyday. Yes, there was 9/11. But do you remember the earlier dead (600,000-minimum corpses in two months) in 1994 Rwanda? Remember the war in Europe's Bosnia-Herzegovina and how the massacred continue to be dug up all over the mountains in Kosovo.
It seems that masses of people people dying without hope has become a common bit of news. But watch what happens when a single child is taken hostage anywhere. You find that we human beings rail furiously against these kind of things, these single instances of things in life that we can point to and call morally unacceptable. And sadly, there is too much that is morally unacceptable:
Morally unacceptable - the horrific spread of AIDS. It is now basically pandemic, and in some parts of the world, ignorance, fear and the inability to meaningfully combat it through education is terrifying. Can effective communication make the difference? Too many die in this country, but in fact, we have a relatively low incidence of AIDS in the U.S. Communication is open in this country. And communication would appear to be effective sometimes, if you're honest about things, don't pussyfoot around, and have the courage to show people the face of death.
Morally unacceptable - death stalks children in schools. And whether you send yours to public or private, city or rural, we've seen too many times the facts of school ... that guns and knives can sit at the desk of the child next to yours. Hell, your kid might even be carrying a piece for self-protection, because the schools certainly have shown they can't provide it.
And carrying-concealed in an environment like that must be, tragically, morally acceptable. Gangs, kids in school, and dropouts roam the streets with a supremely, and righteously justified loss of hope if they come from the inner city. And a senseless hopelessness on the part of even the suburban youth propels some of them through the night. Some, to find themselves in the inner city.
The horrors have all become terrifyingly normal. And they grow in numbers and in the places they reach into our lives.
So what?
What now?Advertising cannot feed the world. Nor can it heal bodies ravaged by AIDS. It cannot breathe hope into a child dead in a dark school hall or on the cholera fields of refugees, nor can advertising cause people of differing backgrounds to understand and accept each other.
But it seems that if we can figure out how to make it more effective ... and this is why it must be more creative than ever ... advertising can be an important part of the mix to control population growth, to reach a new generation of potential AIDS victims with information before it's too late, to help parents know how to work together to control the violence their children potentially walk into every morning, to help people of differing ethnic backgrounds at least begin to form questions that will enable them to learn about each other and begin chipping away at the wall of the fear of the unknown.
Entering Opium Dream City.
Better put the book down right now.The first part of this chapter was designed to really make the point that advertising as we now know it is not working, that it had a better feel for the people it was addressing when it was a matter of true Geeks and Toadies. The second section was developed to show that as a society, we cannot afford to let the profession of advertising languish in mediocrity. We must use advertising to change the realities that have and will become unacceptable.
There is something addressing this concern going under various names ... I know it as "social marketing." Advertising technique is currently being used to reach into various cultures and speak to the people about disease control, about birth control, about farming. To change perceptions and get people to accept new ways of things. While this is a beginning of addressing social issues with advertising, it appears to be relegated to a group of well-intentioned social engineers practicing on specially selected groups of people. We see it in a way in this country with anti-smoking ads and anti-drug ads. But these are mostly useless. It wasn't the advertising that got most of us to quit smoking. It was watching our mothers and fathers between cold white sheets in the hospital die from it. It wasn't the ads that got most of us to quit using drugs. It was simply the process of getting on with life.
The profession of advertising, indeed the very concept of advertising itself, must move beyond the notion that it merely peddles products and services. The language of advertising: the short sound and visual bytes; the compression of massive amounts of information into layers of visual, words and sound data in a TV spot, or a music video on MTV; all of this is how we will communicate in the future. Short. Bytes. No time for the full story, anymore. If we even have that time today.
We will soon live in a world where the common language is sound and visual bytes. This is exactly what advertising is. It compresses reality on many different levels, and if we were to unpack the meanings in a 30-second TV spot, a good one would take hours to explain. But it is done in 30 seconds, not hours.
A lot of the methodology for communicating by bytes is already in the hands of the ad pros. This thing called advertising is the place from which new forms of communication will emerge.
We have a future ahead of us where, like it or not, advertising is going to be asked to take on a more active role in socially responsible activities. Advertising will be a vital part, if not the vital part in a mix of activities designed to positively affect our society and the societies of others. Our private-enterprise advertising can actually pay for most of the research-and-development costs in making advertising more meaningful to the people who see, read, hear it, simply through the experimentation the advertising agencies are supposed to be doing as part of the business their clients pay them for.
But, because today's ad agencies are too often not experimenting to become better, they act negligently through default in regards to their responsibility to meet the communication needs of their customers, and this and other countries. And in the end, this failure of the advertising industry to realize its potential to help build our societies is exactly why it is so important to bring the business of advertising to accountability.
This is not a time in history anymore when we can raise issues like these and pay them lip service and expect our coming generation or "someone else" to chew it through and eventually come up with a Band-Aid solution. We are at an unprecedented time in world history where we realize the need for, and are making, fundamental changes in the way we all do business, live our lives, and rule ourselves when we have that right.
The advertising profession does not have the choice anymore to walk away from the questions that this book, other articles, and some concerned citizens of the world have raised. American advertising must go beyond its relatively trend-following Advertising Council work (remember those meaningless anti-drug commercials?), and actively move more aggressively into the political and social spheres. And it's got to take its clients along for the ride on this roller coaster; with them either smiling in anticipation of the excitement of creating something new, or kicking and screaming with the fear of the coward.
Let us not be unnerved by our clients' long howls of fear.
It's the questions, more than the suggested answers in this book, that would seem of vital importance to our societies. If there are better answers out there than what's suggested, we'd damn well better find them, and find them fast. But let's start asking the questions now. At least let's do that.
Like, do we need direct mail? This is an issue the industry and we as a people need to come to grips with and take on the moral responsibility for. Direct mail. Junk mail. You need to kill trees for the stuff. The people running the show in DM believe they provide a great service in advertising because they can tweak their messages and mailing lists over and over and get a decent, but still tiny response rate. And by making their mailing lists and ads better, they actually end up using less paper and in the end, saving trees and forests. I suppose.
The real issue of direct mail has nothing to do with ad fine-tuning and response rates. The problem is that direct mail is killing trees and our environment in the name of cluttering our mailboxes. I'm no environmentalist, but when I toss half my mail into the garbage before I even open it and know that there are around 293,000,000 people in this country, and that something like 30 percent of landfill is paper products, we really have to start considering that unsolicited direct mail should be considered a criminal act against society. Yeah, a criminal act.
Get better at online ads, and we can get rid of the paper waste. That is a responsibility the American advertising community has to face. It is efficiency at doing the new kinds of work well that will change things. Not making older systems better.
Ads are god ... uh, good.
The last part of this chapter (well, maybe the entire book) is a suggestion that advertising, and its unique methods of message presentation, will soon become the dominant form of the way we talk to each other publicly: from the central government to the outlying people; from business to business; from special interest groups to the public; from ...
The point is that no one in this Internet Age has the time or the energy to pay attention to complex messages or the sheer overwhelming amount of information that's blasted at them every day. And no one will be influenced by something they refuse to pay attention to because:
- there's too much information involved (here are 5,280 ways to make your diet healthier)
- there's far too much information in this world that's meaningless (the Bush's name for their black dog is Barney and Bush dropped it on its head once and you need to know that if you're to understand the caption beneath this cute photo in the papers)
- though information has become (read cynically) the savior of humanity as everyone gets on the Internet and each individual community is linked at home and at work, this savior has its demands (I watched in horror as 10 people in a conference group of about 50 raised their hands to the question, "How many of you get more than 100 e-mail messages per day?"). The numbers are much worse that that for a lot of people.
Advertising is the cure for all that.
Well, if that makes the milk from your cereal come spitting out your nose, maybe it needs a bit of explanation. Consider this: ever since it began (yeah, even before the Geeks and Toadies), some of the basic principles of advertising have been:
- to compress complicated information to a few meaningful and compelling elements;
- to get the message across by paring away the unimportant, and;
- to shape the battlefield of the argument (the ad) so that all internal arguments the target might have against the proposition are neutralized.
Forget about creativity, attracting attention, developing desire, and all those elements of the persuasion process for now. This section is most interested in the communication itself, not the process of the persuasion.
Not bad for an ad in the papers. Compression. Selection. Elimination of competing messages and information. All basic communication tools we're all going to need in order to walk through the coming years. All basic communication tools that countries will need to communicate with their people, whether it be to assist in dissemination of health, farming, political, or other information. All basic tools companies will need to communicate with their employees in health and safety issues, production and benefits issues, and general public relations intended to improve relations with the work force.
And it's got to be compressed because no one has time. For even one sentence.
And now, another irreverent moment.
So, it is in the spirit of the hopeful Geek, live chicken in hand and looking blankly at the expectant crowd in front of him on a warm summer night and thinking warmer thoughts about a later rendezvous with the Midget Dog-Faced Bearded Woman, that this book on the state of advertising today was written.
What we must do in the advertising future is something infinitely more serious than the crowd satisfaction found in the quick biting off of the head of a chicken, which sadly, is all that we seem to be doing today. If even that.
But maybe ... maybe if we offered people something worth looking at ... maybe if we entertained and respected the people we talk to from the TV screen, or over morning coffee from the newspaper ad a little more ... maybe if we realized and remembered that the people out there are the only reason we're even being asked by our clients to perform ... maybe if we thought about tomorrow in terms of years rather than merely as an ad placement in tomorrow's morning papers ... maybe if we think of what we as advertising professionals can attempt to do socially ... maybe they won't send us to live with the lawyers and the Toadies when we retire after all.
16. The Daily Telegraph, Wildlife Frantic semantics Keeping tabs on our changing language: geek, John Morrish, September 6, 1997, Telegraph Magazine, Pg. 010. Also, historically, Geeks were rather pathetic and mindless human beings who burned out on drink, or never had a day in school and had no real life to ever look forward to, much less kids to eventually have to explain the job to.
17. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY.), Words, Words, Words, Michael G. Gartner, November 16, 1997, Pg.02D, for a good accounting of the use of a toady in the snake-oil profession.
18. Soap, Sex and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising, Juliann Sivulka, 1997, Wadsworth Publishing Co., p.9.
19. Advertising in the U.S. was built around research to determine its effectiveness. A brilliant scholar named Paul Lazarsfeld in the 1940s and on, built an institute based on social research, and advertising was one of his fields of specialization.
20. Big World, Small Screen.
21. The Washington Post, In Rwanda, Neighbors No More; Massacres, Migrations Spur Self-Segregation, Stephen Buckley, December 20, 1996, p. A35.
22. The Gazette (Montreal), Niger's Islamists denounce condom use, porno films, Niamey, November 20, 1994, p. B8
23. The Washington Post, Estimate of HIV Infection Rises to 30.6 Million Globally; More Accurate Measure Used for Africa, Asia, David Brown, November 26, 1997, p. A06.24. A 14-year-old kid in Peducah, Kentucky was in jail at the time of writing the originalk draft, accused of shooting to death three of his schoolmates a couple weeks earlier. Just another killing in school of a series that year. Newsweek, Tragedy in a small place. Daniel Pedersen and Sarah Van Boven, Dec. 15, 1997, p. 30-31.
25. See, for example, The Ottawa Citizen, Health Marketed Like Sneakers, Maria Bohuslawsky, April 28, 1995, p. C2.
26. Chicago Tribune, The Good Business of Reusing Paper, Editorial, May 24, 1995, p.26.