I had my cake and ate it, too, or something.

Mine's better

When I was a kid –– around seven –– I decided to learn how to cook. And what does a seven-year-old learn how to cook? Right. Devil's food cake.

My mom gave me her recipe and impetuous youth that I was, I immediately set out to improve it.

Which I did.

I'm not going to lie to you. I didn't spend my entire childhood perfecting cakes, but I did make enough of them to get pretty good.

I like devil's food cake. A lot. And that created a problem. I had the limited patience of a seven-year-old. So as soon as a cake had barely cooled, I'd flip it over and pick a little piece out of the bottom. Just to make sure it came out alright.

And nobody would notice.

Before long, I was taking bigger and bigger samples. Until one day, I ate the entire inside. I couldn't help myself.

That night, at dessert, my mom cut into... a shell. Seriously. There was nothing to it but about a half inch of the outside, left perfectly intact, just barely enough to support itself without collapsing. Christopher Wren would have been proud.

There's a point. And the point is about over promise.

Everybody sitting around the table that night expeceted a cake. Not just a cake, but one of my pretty amazing devil's food cakes. 

What they got was not-cake. They weren't happy about the crust they did get, even though the tiny bit that was left was super good. They were disappointed because they didn't get as much as they thought they were going to.

And this is what happens over and over, every day, in our lives. Movie advertising that tells us to see "The movie of the decade." Book jackets that exclaim "The best novel you'll ever read." Packages that scream "New and Improved." Both. Like something can be both new and improved.

Hollywood is continually stunned when a little independent film makes a ton of money at the box office. But if you think about it, what's happening is that that little independent film might actually be no better than just okay, but simply can't afford to buy favorable reviews and a huge marketing campaign. Without any hype, there's no expectation. When there's no expectation, there's no disappointment. People who see the film tell their friends. And suddenly, word of mouth is accomplishing what a $200 million ad budget can't.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Brian, you have to get people into the theater in the first place. How do you do that without making an over promise of some kind?"

There is a way. Back when I was learning how to be a copywriter, we called it creativity.

Or, to come full circle, don't just follow the recipe. Figure out how to improve it.

A really nice commercial. Then I actually saw it.

Last night, this spot was on one of the TVs at the gym. I saw about 45% of it with no sound, from across the room, while I was trying to use the eliptical machine. But that was enough.

Enough to know that the line was going to be "Wash your day away."

Nice.

I was intrigued enough with the spot that when I got home, I went onto YouTube to see the whole thing, top to bottom, with sound and no distraction.

You know what? It's worse.

I was right about the line, by the way. But 'Car Wash'? That's the music they chose? And paid to license? I would have lost that bet.

It's not just the music, though, that makes this spot a disappointment. It's the fact that there's a really unique (although in my mind, of questionable value) point of difference to the product being advertised, and yet the message is generic enough to have been used for any shower head. It's as if somebody had come up with this spot for the new business pitch, before they actually got into the tactical messaging, and trotted it out for this assignment. Which happens, by the way, more often than people will admit.

This whole episode reminds me of a moment I had when I first moved to New York years ago. I was shopping for a house plant and heard a girl's voice from the other side of a row of ficuses. She said, presumably to a friend, "That's my kind of plant."

Five words, but there was something about her voice, both the quality and the inflection, that touched me. The way she said that one sentence made me think that this was somebody I'd want to meet. Maybe even marry. But by the time I rushed around to see where the voice had come from, whoever she was had vanished.

For years, every girl I dated or even liked was unintentionally (and unfairly) compared to the hypothetical ideal that that voice created, until I ultimately ended up marrying someone whose other strengths compensated for a voice that –– next to Mystery Plant Girl's –– was brash and a bit nasal.

As I look back, I'm glad I never met the girl who said those words.

I wish I never saw the entire Delta Faucet spot.

Why most advertising sucks. (Part 5)

Every once in a while, somebody says what I want to say better than I could have said it myself. Today's example comes from Bob Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman/Lewis advertising. 


Bob writes one of the few blogs I regularly follow, called 'The Ad Contrarian'. Here's what he says about why advertising is so crappy:


Like most sensible people, here at The Ad Contrarian world headquarters we do our best to avoid advertising.

This keeps getting harder and harder.

Despite all the witless proclamations of new age marketing gurus about the death of advertising, advertising isn't just growing, it's metastasising.  Every click of a mouse brings us at least three ads. TV watching is at its highest level ever. Every person wearing a hat or a t-shirt has become a walking billboard.

Things that used to be just helpful have now also become advertising carriers -- ticket stubs, museum maps, dry cleaning bags, milk cartons...

You can't swing a dead media planner without hitting an ad.

And while advertising has gotten bigger and bigger, it hasn't gotten much better.

I'm not one of those old guys who thinks that there was a golden age of advertising (or music, or movies, or literature) in which everything was brilliant and that everything since then has been crap.  I believe that most advertising (and most music, movies, and literature) have always been pretty lousy, and today's lousy is no worse than any other era's lousy.

The reason most advertising (and artistic endeavors) are lousy is not that people set out to create crap. It's that creating something good is really, really hard. And there are very few people who can do it.

The idea that we are all creative and that if we just free ourselves from the stultifying shackles of society we can unleash a torrent of creativity is juvenile nonsense. Creativity is rare and precious. Many seek it. Few have it.

With all the amazing advances in technology and communication, you would think there might be some concomitant blossoming of creativity. But there hasn't been. Not in advertising, not in music, not in art, not in literature, not in movies.

Maybe that's why our industry has become obsessed with technology and media. There have been impressive, sometimes startling, leaps of innovation and inspiration in these areas.

But, sadly, the "content" is just as crappy as ever.