The Art of War In Advertising

 

. . . The ad agency copywriter and creative director relationship creates a setup akin to making Kurt Cobain have his songs checked by, say, John Lennon. We don't know John Lennon but there is the likelihood that Johns would say to Kurts, "That's not the way you write songs,. Nobody'd listen to that, nobody'd take you seriously."

---an ad agency copywriter-friend

 

Their creative director checks his
writers' advertising copy studies
with sighs and obsessive-compulsive
impatience unworthy of a man who
constantly seeks approval for his
self-doubting genius everytime he
says, "This is the way I'd rather
have it. Now isn't that there an
            improvement?"

With rumors about my mediocrity,
what better way to defend myself
than with closed doors to all sorts
of democracy, clothing my masks
with the colors of authority,
my self-hate obvious in the way
I'd express silence over things
I'd rather believe; but with long-
            dependent

hands tied to the luxury of a
high salary, why should one flaunt
dissenting opinions against those
that put him there? Hidden corrupt
agenda are after all defensible
with the rhetoric of the merely
articulate! What suffers is the
infantry, its integrity everytime
            it clamors

for "creative excellence", the very
phrase us leeches and the rulers
grabbed for our own contexts, by
our army's standards, firing it
as the new slogan of a corrupt
age of long-term profits. Is this
what happens when your executives
are cold, ambitious, and nervous?
            Desert!

 

 

 

Copyright © 1999, 2004 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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