The doorbell rang. Mrs. Watson hurried to the door, two-year-old Freddie hot on her heels as always. It was the postman. As his mother took delivery of a special package and fumbled for a pen to sign the receipt, Freddie peeked happily around her skirt at the heavy brown shoes, blue uniform trousers, and up, up at … “Hey, you don’t have fingers,” he yelled. Mom blanched. The postman grinned. Over her stumbling apology, he said kindly, “Well, sonny, you’re right, I lost three of my fingers in a fire.” Freddie wasted no time. He knitted his eyebrows, pursed his lips and deepened his voice to the extent his budding vocal chords would allow. “Smokey Bear say, don’t play with matches.” In his book The Wizard of Ads, Roy Williams writes “the risk of insult is the price of clarity.” Thankfully, political correctness hasn’t invaded the heads of little people who still tell it like it is. Advertisers could take a lesson from Freddie. Most of them travel with the herd, avoiding clarity. Timidly, they hedge and side-step, preferring to speak in generalizations, finding comfort in euphemisms and the “dead words” of advertising. Smokey didn’t say, “Please avoid any activity that could have a combustible outcome.” Smokey was explicit. And even a two-year-old remembered.

To be supremely kind, most advertising is forgettable. The big boys overcome  mediocrity with massive media dollars. Force-feeding the populace is their game and they play it well, much as an army wears down the enemy with waves of infantry. But the majority of business owners don’t have multi-million dollar ad budgets. Their challenge is to create compelling messages, to gain attention amid the noise and the clutter, to somehow be noticed, believed and bought. Well, here’s a flash — it just ain’t happening out there, folks — very, very seldom. Memorable work rarely sees the light of day. Who’s to blame? Ad agencies, about 20 percent of the time. The rest of the fault lies with company management that routinely commit two deadly sins — either they play it safe and avoid risk, or they beg for attention by being different, just for different sake.  For marketers and their masters, making a mistake is unacceptable; so they steer clear of the edge and the pitfalls which lurk there. In the same way teens dress alike to feel accepted, advertisers feel more comfortable with the 80 percent majority, copying trends and enjoying the feeling of belonging and blending. In the other extreme, marketers desperately try to be hip, thinking that “hipness” somehow equates with excellence. Professional marketers work persistently to alter the 80-20 Rule, but it’s hopeless changing an immutable Law of Nature.

Those of us old enough to look back a few decades can better appreciate the blessings of today’s Information Age. It doesn’t seem that long ago, really, that we had to make life’s important decisions by observing parents, by reading and studying, by attending church and listening to our Inner Voice. Thankfully, those days are over. Now, through television and other media connections, we have instantaneous access to the beliefs and opinions of movie stars, professional athletes, talk show hosts, celebrity attorneys and politicians who are uniquely gifted to tell us what to think and how to feel. What a relief. We no longer have to waste precious time examining tiresome literature or grappling with moral, cultural and spiritual issues on our own. Luckily, Geraldo and Oprah are there for us.