Occupy Madison Avenue?

The harm we do.

(As David Mamet repeats ad nauseum,) here’s the thing: advertising is the life-blood of free-market capitalism. It’s the critical building block of our competitive marketplace. Without advertising’s ability to create awareness of options, choices, innovations and benefits, none of the global, powerhouse brands would even exist. None. And the world would be a very different place.

If it weren’t for highly effective marketing, we’d likely have just one brand of automobile, or soap, or burger. We’d likely have just one place to buy clothing. Might as well be communists, right?

But that doesn’t mean that all we do in the name of competitive advantage is good and just. Much of what we’ve done is inexcusable. For one, our profession has permanently affected language in negative ways that may well never be changed back.

Just one example is “think different” (created by TBWA\Chiat\Day … not Apple.) That intentional aberration of adverb use (along with its gap-toothed cousin from AT&T, “rethink possible”) has wrongly taught at least one generation, and infuriated a good many of us.

Another highly annoying example is “lite,” the moronic bastardization of “light” that has become the norm for beer, music, “healthy menu options” – just one more aberration that confuses the hell out of school children. Does this stuff bother you the way it bothers me?

Granted, the English language is highly inconsistent. We say bite, but not nite (or lite … or nite-lite). Bear and tear serve multiple purposes. It takes practice and focus to keep it straight. Knowing and sticking to the rules is the only way to make certain things are as clear as possible.

Language defines us.

So, is it all right to be hip and cool at the expense of language? Be careful how you answer that. To many (me included), language is culture – the very thing that defines who we are.

English in the U.S. is already 400 years away from English in the U.K. We’re culturally distinct. (The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have said that in less than 200 years’ time we’ll need translators.)

How powerful is language? Imagine that one morning every German suddenly could only speak Italian, and all Italians could only speak German. Would they still be Germans and Italians? If that morning had occurred in the 1930s, would there have even been a WWII?

You see where this is heading. Language doesn’t just inform us, it defines us; language conveys our level of consciousness; language is what distinguishes us from all other life forms. So how can ad agencies be so casual about its fundamental laws of use?

The before-our-time Madison Avenue slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” outraged grammarians and educated people everywhere back in the 50s. Yet it stuck. For 20 years. Such is the power of advertising. If you’ve seen it in print, it’s hard to argue against it.

“Winston tastes good as a cigarette should” hardly would have sounded as snappy in the brand-making, RJR cigarette-selling jingle of early television days.

“Think differently” would likely have not had as much of an impact as the entirely incorrect version that has come to define Apple.

But at what cost?

This is your brain on advertising.

The very language that we’re taught and depend on to communicate clearly and effectively is what suffers the consequences. At the very least, we’ll have more and more misguided “copywriters” bastardizing the English (or your choice) language.

What am I talking about? Take a look at these jaw-dropping, grammar-destroying automobile commercials:

Mercedes C-Class Coupe – More power. More style, More technology. Less doors. (Uggghhhh. I can hear the copywriter’s mind working … “People say ‘more or less,’ right? Not ‘more or fewer.’ So it must be ‘less.’ Besides, we don’t want to be less hip than Apple…”)

Honda Civic – To each their own. (Ouch. This noun subject and possessive pronoun disagreement may well have arisen from a desire to be ‘PC.’  … “You know, why ‘his,’ why does it have to be male-oriented all the time? What? Singular, plural? What are you talking about? Let’s just go with ‘their.’” “Yeah, dude, ‘their.’”)

[That's a whole other topic: if you don't use a cliché in its original form, it loses its power.]

This slope is very slippery.

See where this is going? See how things are snowballing? As more grammar-flaunting (grammar-ignorant?) “copywriters” decide that they, too can bend the rules, the ill-advised will be increasing the number of the ill-educated. And who’s at fault? Yep, ad agencies.

It must be a conscious decision to warp grammar in order to suit a marketing concept. There’s even a warping of a “rule” to justify it: The Pareto Principle – the 80/20 rule, which originally described how 20 percent of Italian landowners owned 80 percent of the land.

As applied in advertising, the Pareto principle has come to mean that 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of a specific target audience. In the case of messing with language and grammar, the ad agency self-justification seems to be that 80 percent of people won’t care about bad (or non-existent) grammar … or even recognize it. (Shudder.)

Clearly, I’m one of the 20 percent. Are you? Wonder if we should occupy something …