Advertising is at its best when we take ourselves too seriously and our language too literally. Did you know the greatest Volkswagen ad of all time wasn’t about a car, but a piece of citrus? The man in the Hathaway shirt was a rehabilitated pirate sans peg leg and parrot, and Apple’s most famous commercial wasn’t an ode to creative genius, but to the mentally ill.
Instead of saying “meet me in the war room to kill some ideas,” if you say, “meet me the idea place to discuss creativity without judgment” you are helping people living in warzones. They may not know it, but by reducing the intensity in your workplace, you’re taking down the global temperature a significant degree. Comedians shouldn’t bomb unless they happen to be flying in the Enola Gay.
The phrase “divide and conquer,” isn’t something you say when sorting leftovers with a range of Tupperware containers, but rather, a phrase clearly redolent of Genghis Khan’s imperial aspirations. The last thing you want amongst colleagues is to conjure up images of rampaging Mongols making their way across Eurasia.
Don’t kill bad ideas. Feed them, clothe them, and send them to expensive boarding schools in rural New England.
The enemy of advertising isn’t unoriginality, it’s metaphor. I always knew there was a good reason saying “like” too much was a problem.
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