Badvertising: An Expose of Insipid, Insufferable, Ineffective Advertising

By Jim Morris and Drew Eric Whitman

Jim Morris has been responsible for some of the most memorable ad campaigns in history. He knows best that bad ads don’t just create themselves. Part indictment on the advertising industry, part cautionary tale on what not to do with your ads, Jim pulls no punches to better ad people everywhere.

“How many ads have you seen that made you question the intelligence of whomever designed it? Probably too many. If every ad person read Badvertising, the world would be a more intelligent and prosperous place.” —Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst

“Incisive and daring, Badvertising is the only book you need to truly understand both the inner workings of America’s ad agencies, and the minds of those who never cease to astound us with both their creative genius and profound stupidity. After just one reading, you’ll never see advertising the same way again.” —Drew Eric Whitman, bestselling author of Cashvertising

How can the ad industry even exist when almost all of the products that it produces fall on a continuum from flawed to failed? What is it about this industry and the process of creating, selling, and producing ads that causes so much advertising to be so bad?

These are the questions answered in Badvertising. A provocative, truth-to-power exposé of ad agencies’ flaws, foibles, and failings—and why they matter to the consumer and to those in the business. Morris, an advertising legend known as “Tagline Jim,” surveys myriad advertising “agents of stupidity.” Hilarious, horrifying, and insightful, each chapter is a grenade lobbed into America’s ad bunkers.

Badvertising is a candid, never-seen-before accumulation of real-world don’ts and more don’ts, providing valuable cautionary tales of advertising’s stupid side.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Career Press
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781632657510

Jim Morris

Retired U.S. Army Special Forces Major Jim Morris served three tours with the Green Berets in Vietnam. He has worked as a civil rights advocate for the mountain peoples with whom he fought, the Montagnard, and his Vietnam memoir, War Story, won the first Bernal Diaz Award for military non-fiction. He has covered wars for Rolling Stone, Soldier of Fortune, Esquire, and the Saturday Evening Post. For decades he has immersed himself in a deep study of Toltec shamanism. He lives in Bell Canyon, California.

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PREFACE

I Love Advertising; It's Advertising I Hate

AT THE RISK of sounding like a devoted parent, let me start by saying I wouldn't have written this book if I didn't care so much about advertising.

When it comes to the need for advertising to make our free-enterprise system possible, I am a zealot. Some of the most entertaining moments I experience watching TV, reading a magazine, listening to the radio, or even when I'm online come from good ads. Not as many as I'd wish; but when they happen, you can't beat it. (I could say the same for New Yorker cartoons, by the way.)

As a copywriter, I love working in advertising for four reasons. First, each assignment represents an opportunity to problem-solve creatively, which I find to be exquisite torture. Second, each new project has me scrambling up a learning curve getting to know a bunch of stuff I didn't previously know about some group of people or some product or service that often exists within some world with which I'm not familiar. Being a copywriter, to paraphrase my grandmother, makes me a lifelong student.

In this business, you get to know all kinds of things about the world and humanity. And about language. Communication is unlikely, if you get what I'm saying. Thus spake my alter ego, Chairman Jimmy. To which I reply: Unlikely, yes. But when you succeed, you demonstrate the best of humanity. And the hits just keep on coming. This is what ensures that, for me, creating advertising is never boring; my brain is continually stimulated and challenged.

The third reason I love working in advertising is that every ad I work on holds the potential to become a small contribution to our popular culture. It doesn't always work out that way; but when it does, it's very rewarding. And the fourth and final reason? It beats working.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention getting satisfaction from helping a business or other organization grow, succeed, and accomplish its goals. That is because, very often, I'm unable to prove any of this. Of course, when some advertising I help create does contribute to the success of a client, it's very fulfilling. But I can't hang my emotional hat on that, given how infrequently it's possible to quantify this success—to say nothing of the role the advertising may play in helping to achieve it.

So that's the advertising I love.

The advertising I hate is what this book is all about. The business of advertising, and the process of creating advertising, is a mess. And although this mess is not unique to advertising, advertising is what I know about. The mess as it pertains to other businesses and other contexts is a book for someone else to write.

By exposing many of the systemic, habitual, and entrenched flaws in the process of creating, targeting, and evaluating advertising—which I call, collectively, Agents of Stupidity—I hope to inspire other adfolk to chip away at these flaws incrementally. And even if, after reading this book, no one is actually motivated to address these Agents, which is a distinct possibility, well, at least I will have gotten all this pent-up frustration with the advertising process off my chest.

So who the heck am I? And how did I come to care so much about advertising?

For starters, I grew up on TV and have never shaken the addiction. I've always read lots of magazines. And there have been stretches in my life when I've listened to lots of radio. During my formative years, these media carried the bulk of the advertising that fostered my fondness for the craft.

As far back as I can remember, I have loved what I considered good advertisements. As a kid, there was the goofy Hawaiian Punch guy and the Kraml Milk commercials featuring what I believe were the first Muppets. Benson & Hedges put out commercials featuring their problematically long cigarettes. Alka-Seltzer and Volkswagen were creating their classic commercials. And the Schweppes and Hathaway ads in The New Yorker introduced me to Stan Freberg in his prime, and then to Bill Bernbach in his.

Of course, then, as now, the preponderance of ads were unmitigated crap. But to invoke Theodore Sturgeon's oft-quoted adage—which he made in defense of the science-fiction genre—Ninety percent of everything is crap. So why should advertising be any different?

The point is that there was, and is, so much advertising out there, that if even 5 or 10 percent of it is good—clever, funny, entertaining, smart, surprising, likable, even poignant (oh yeah, I almost forgot, effective)—that's still a considerable pile of good stuff. And this pile of good advertising is proof that it can be done. But all this just raises the question this book tries to answer: Why is the remaining 90 percent of ads so dang bad?

When I was in high school, my father was Assistant Managing Editor and then Managing Editor at Advertising Age, and there were always issues of Ad Age lying around the house. Curious to understand what my father actually did, I often flipped through them. And this, of course, poured gas onto the fire of my rapidly growing passion for advertising. Yet even at that early age, I wondered how it was possible that ad agencies—the ones that produced those great ads I saw all the time—could run such lame, boring ads for themselves in the pages of Ad Age.

Later, when I turned thirty and abandoned my decade-long quest to be a rock-and-roll star, I made the career change from music to advertising. It was then that my avid interest in advertising as a cultural phenomenon, a source of entertainment and information, a business, and an intellectually challenging problem-solving endeavor exploded. I blossomed into a full-fledged, dyed-in-the-wool ad guy.

Part of being an ad guy, for me at least, was becoming a student of all things advertising. At my first ad agency, Tatham Laird & Kudner (aka TLK, long ago swallowed up by Havas), I was gang-mentored by Bill Klimas (the creative director who hired me) and Al Weninger (his art director), along with Tom Jordan, who would go on to transform Hoffman York in Milwaukee into an exceptional ad agency. The late Scott Ferraiolo, too gifted a writer for this world, as well as several senior copywriters and creatives—which is what writers, art directors, and designers are called in the ad biz—played a role as well. This gang mentoring also included some peer mentoring by several other creatives in the group, most notably art director Melanie Fiacchino and fellow copywriter Keith Kinney. The longer I stayed in the business, the more I learned and the more I began to notice what I would later dub Agents of Stupidity lurking in the halls of both ad agencies and clients. I began asking myself early on why we did things in ways that seemed to make no apparent sense.

At first, I assumed that there must be good reasons for this behavior—reasons that I was not yet sufficiently experienced to understand. In time, however, this assumption gave way to a growing suspicion that the business was actually inundated with, and tormented by, the yin of what I call adhubris and the yang of fear—not just fear of failure, but of humiliation. The entire process of creating advertising was riddled with insecurity, irrationality, non-sensical assumptions, laziness, mythical and magical beliefs, fallacies, and on and on.

My first response, of course, was to figure out coping mechanisms to prevent my brain from exploding when confronted with these Agents. One of these was to invent an alter ego named Chairman Jimmy, whose job it was to provide perspective and give me a place to vent—articulating my frustrations in the form of aphorisms. You'll find his words of wisdom throughout this book. And some of the truest words that Chairman Jimmy ever spouted were: Enjoy the process, because the result is usually a letdown. The Chairman's pragmatic approach has helped me to survive in the advertising world—and even to enjoy it—for so many decades. And I have found that his wisdom applies to everything in life as well, not just advertising.

For twelve years, I taught copywriting part time at Columbia College. Overall, it was a disheartening experience. As far as I know, only two or three of my students actually went on to careers in advertising. Of course, I'm in no position to lament this result, considering that my stated goal—a goal I shared with my students on the first day of every class—was to convince them not to go into advertising. This was my way of letting them know I would be teaching them the realities, not the glamor, of working at an ad agency. After I spent a semester cautioning and terrorizing them about all of what I would later term advertising's Agents of Stupidity, I thought that any student still determined to become a copywriter might have what it takes to survive the ugly side of the advertising business.

As it turns out, the negative messaging that arose out of my teaching experience became an undercurrent that ran through the rest of my own career. It flowed through the monthly advertising column I wrote for Screen, a Chicago trade publication that reports on the film-and commercial-production industries. Most of the two dozen or so columns I wrote for Screen examined Agents of Stupidity, even though the term hadn't yet occurred to me. This undercurrent grew into a vigorous stream as I became a frequent contributor to David Littlejohn's late blog, Advertising for Peanuts, as well as to the Tagblog on my own web site. My speaking career contributed as well.

When I was promoting my first book, The Width and Wisdom of Chairman Jimmy, I was invited to give a talk at a Midwest Regional MENSA convention. As I searched for a topic, the rough outlines of this book boiled to the surface, along with the term Agents of Stupidity and the book's title—Badvertising. Once I had given a name to these concepts that had been swirling around in my mind, the book quickly took shape in my head.

As you read this book, I invite you to email me with any other Agents of Stupidity you may have come across. Your input will help me to compile the sequel to this book, which will be titled, ingeniously, Badvertising Two. Meanwhile, I hope this first volume will shine a light on its own collection of Agents of Stupidity for three reasons:

To forewarn those thinking of working in advertising to keep an eye out for these Agents.

To make those of us who labor in the fields of advertising more aware of these nefarious Agents and how they operate, the better to vanquish them whenever, wherever, and in whatever ways we can.

To give regular people—civilians—a more informed understanding of how and why so much of the advertising they must endure is simply bad. This may improve their tolerance for bad ads, and/or it may encourage them to take a more active role in the conversation between themselves and the brands they like or dislike. In other words, maybe I can incite regular folks to complain more often, more vociferously, and more knowledgeably when they suffer from bad advertising.

INTRODUCTION

Bad Ads Don't Create Themselves

CHAIRMAN JIMMY SAYS:

In order to have the courage of your convictions, first

you need convictions.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity;

and I'm not sure about the universe.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

BAD ADVERTISEMENTS—and let's face it, that's most advertisements—don't just create themselves. It takes a concerted, industry-wide effort involving many entrenched practices—what I call Agents of Stupidity—to produce what I call Badvertising. This book is an examination—an outing, if you will—of twenty-three of these Agents, many of which also operate in other contexts of human interaction, from families to global businesses to enterprises of all sorts. But because I'm an ad guy, we will be looking at them here through the lens of advertising and the advertising business.

Agents of Stupidity Are Whats, Not Whos

Agents of Stupidity aren't people. They are not agents like booking agents or secret agents. They are more like toxic agents. Advertising's Agents of Stupidity are not designed or intended to produce stupid results, but they do so just the same—like bees don't intend to fertilize flowers, but do it anyway.

Badvertising is a result of many Agents of Stupidity manifesting themselves through the thoughts and actions of advertising people. It is rooted in wrong-headed, arrogant, often perverse processes and habits. These mythologies, inherent limitations, thinking errors, dysfunctions, and rampant disingenuities are the skeletons in advertising's closet—skeletons that inhabit the bodies and minds of ad people at times. If we in advertising ever hope to confront and vanquish these Agents, first we have to out them. We have to come clean and get real, so that we can make space in our closet and clear out all the smoke and mirrors that have forever been our stock-in-trade—and our Achilles' heel. (The award for the most mixed metaphors in one sentence goes to . . .)

But just because Agents of Stupidity are not themselves individual people, that doesn't let those of us in the advertising business off the hook, because these Agents operate through us. They are enabled, expressed, or manifested through the thoughts and actions of people who are involved in the process of creating, selling, and producing ads. For example, Overthink is an Agent of Stupidity (see chapter 5). But Overthink doesn't just happen in a disembodied way. People overthink things, and they bear the responsibility for indulging in Overthink.

Yes, I'm talking to you—whether you work at an ad agency or someplace similar like a design firm or a marketing communications company; whether you deal in some way with advertising at a company, organization, or institution; whether you are an entrepreneur; and especially if you're a student considering joining our ranks. This book is intended as a real-world dose of cold water to the face. Working in advertising is many things—stimulating, fun, never boring, incredibly challenging, often exhausting, and occasionally rewarding. But it can also be, and often is, frustrating, disheartening, infuriating, even enraging. And many of these latter emotions can be attributed to Agents of Stupidity. To confront these Agents, however, we must first recognize and understand them for what they are. Only then can we determine what, if anything, we can do to eliminate them, or at least to mitigate their effects.

This book does not provide the kryptonite that can vanquish most of the dark forces that are responsible for Badvertising, however. We each have to figure that out for ourselves. Instead, this book is intended as a wake-up call, a plea to throw off the blinders, face our demons, and do whatever is in our power to vanquish these Agents. After all, civilians—those who consume advertising (which, of course, includes all of us in the industry as well, since we are all dedicated consumers)—are entitled to know just why so much of the advertising they are subjected to is so god-awful. In Part III, I suggest a few things that people can do once they are armed with this new understanding of how these Agents corrupt the advertising with which we all must deal.

For those who don't think that all this crappy advertising is really all that crappy, I urge you to take a closer, more thoughtful look. In this book, I do my best to disabuse you of this notion. Once you've read the book, let me know if you're still okay with the constant barrage of garbage with which you are assaulted every day.

Three Causes of Stupidity in Advertising

This book is largely about some of the variables that are seldom taken into account when trying to determine what is responsible for failed advertising. Some of these variables are rooted in complexity; some are rooted in what I call adhubris; some are rooted in fear. And all these roads lead to Badvertising.

Complexity

Advertising is neither fish nor fowl. It inevitably gets ground up in its own cross-purposes and contradictions. It operates in a space that is fundamentally in between, caught in a multi-layered netherworld from which there is no escape. It is neither science nor art, but tries to be both. It's a largely immeasurable, qualitative business that struggles to exist in a quantitative, metrics-driven, data-ridden world.

Advertising's mission entails simplifying impossibly complex phenomena. It strives to simplify the target audience—that subset of humanity identified as most likely to be interested in the message carried by a particular ad—by segmenting it into tidy groups (see chapter 16). Likewise, its goal is to simplify a given product, service, or brand down to one single-minded (simple-minded?) message or benefit, and to simplify that message down to one key visual image or set of words.

Unfortunately, the advertising world is equipped with limited and rather anemic tools for simplifying this complexity, which is rooted in a messy mélange of millions of individual brains rubbing up against each other and against the culture in which they float. Because of this, reducing this complexity to something simple usually means reducing it to something fatally simplistic. We'll take a more in-depth look at the whole issue of simplifying complexity in chapter 14.

Adhubris

Most of the stupidity in advertising is not rooted in ignorance—or, to be generous, in limited knowledge—regarding its own subject matter and the people (target audience) that it's trying to affect. Rather, this stupidity stems from what I call adhubris—adfolk's arrogant, self-deluded refusal to human up and acknowledge their own limitations. Advertising doesn't actually know much, but it pretends there isn't much it doesn't know. In truth, everything that goes on in advertising is based on guesses—educated guesses, often, but guesses nevertheless.

The refusal of people in advertising to own up to this reality condemns the entire industry to permanent status as slick, glib, disingenuous hucksters parading as truth-tellers in a world where truth is too complicated, nuanced, and fuzzy for them to grasp. Although they grapple with this truth, they just don't seem to be able to get real about it.

Fear

Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of not looking cool. Fear of humiliation. Fear of being provocative, or even evocative. Fear of the boss. Fear of decisions. Fear of clients. Fear of being wrong. Fear of your own shadow.

Advertising is an inherently risky business. You take a shot. If it doesn't work, you try something else. And the stakes can be very high. You'd think the people drawn to careers in advertising would have a high tolerance for risk. And this is true to a degree. But for some reason, the industry is populated with far too many risk-averse people—perhaps because they have bought into the myth that advertising is a somewhat scientific enterprise. But don't take my word for it. Here's David Ogilvy's take on the problem:

Most agencies run scared, most of the time . . . Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising . . . If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.¹

Moreover, advertising involves more than financial risk; emotional risk plays a big part as well. The creatives who come up with advertising ideas often become emotionally invested in them. And there is emotional risk for account people, marketing-research people, media people, and clients as well, because, at some point, they all have a hand in choosing which ad campaign will be unleashed on the world.

If a campaign doesn't produce results, the risk isn't just financial. All of these people risk their professional credibility and reputations as well. And everyone involved is at risk, because it is seldom possible to determine precisely what caused the failure of a campaign. Was the media plan flawed? Did the ad target the wrong audience? Did the message fail to resonate with the target audience? Was the product or service just a loser? Many variables contribute to the success or failure of an ad campaign, and figuring out what went right and what went wrong entails its share of guessing.

Confessions and Disclaimers

These three central causes of Badvertising—complexity, adhubris, and fear—spin off a long list of Agents of Stupidity, from Overthink to Causation Correlation Confusion. They also extend to the latest shiny objects that mesmerize adfolk—things like social media, big data, or the pseudo-scientific discipline of neuromarketing. Unfortunately, this book will consider only twenty-three of these Agents. But it's a start.

The boundaries between many of these Agents are often blurred and they tend to overlap. I've tried to point to examples where discussions of one Agent can be found in a chapter devoted to another. But I can't promise that I've identified every instance of overlap and blurred boundaries. I apologize for this in advance.

Moreover, while I speak of these Agents in the context of the advertising world, many, perhaps most, of them lurk in the halls of other kinds of businesses as well, and in organizations like hospitals and schools. Really, they can manifest themselves in any situation where humans interact. I limit this discussion to advertising's Agents of Stupidity because that's how I know them best, having spent forty years in the business.

Past Is Prologue

As you read on, you may begin to wonder why I talk mostly about old-school, obsolete TV commercials. Hasn't advertising moved on to deal with today's data-driven, contextual advertising? Hasn't it incorporated online videos, mobile ads, social-media ads, experiential marketing, and micro-targeted, programmatic campaigns? Not exactly.

There are three reasons why I concern myself primarily with traditional advertising. First, while today's new advertising forms and formats are being given far more attention by ad agencies and younger audiences, it's still the case that the most common denominator in advertising is TV commercials, along with equally old-school media like print ads and outdoor billboards. If you're eighteen, you're still familiar with these forms of advertising, even if you don't own a TV and consume all your advertising on a smaller screen. But if you're fifty-five, the advertising experiences you share with younger consumers are more likely to be TV commercials than online videos or Facebook posts. (By the way, if you're fifty-five and still employed in the ad biz, congratulations—and watch your back.) In other words, as familiar as you may be with the online world, more of the public is going to be more