You And Me And Monkeys Throwing Darts

Dude, calm down. Here's what the future holds -- the same crap as now, only worse.

Whether it's advertising or airlines, retailing or telecommunication, consolidation has been a service nightmare for customers.

Da Vinci didn't need a strategist. Neither did Newton. Or Einstein. Or Gershwin. Or Hitchcock. Or Riney, for that matter. They just did brilliant things. They didn't need people chattering at them about what they should do or how they should do it. They just did it.

Great creative people are smarter than us. They will challenge everything we say, they will scoff at the pathetic strategies we come up with, and they will make trouble and annoy the shit out of us.

The most powerful force in marketing is not price, quality, distribution, advertising, or branding -- it's the resistance to change.

But I do know how to sell them. Get your real creative leader together with their real decision maker, and get everyone else out of the fucking way.

The workings of the real world are impossibly complex and messy. And in advertising, as in every other human endeavor, as Glieck says, we "prefer to turn a blind eye to reality’s messiness."

Simplify and specify I‘ve seen thousands of ads that were too complicated or too generic. I’ve never seen one that was too simple or too specific.