The Advertising Curmudgeon

I think that I have completed the metamorphosis from regular advertising guy to advertising curmudgeon. This revelation hit me a few months ago, when I started sounding like Lewis Black when I was asked about anything related to the business itself.

I like Lewis Black. He’s a witty, thought-provoking, irreverent comedian. But a little Lewis goes a long way. Same with me. I have realized that I expound more now than ever. Is this good? I don’t know. Ah, but is it blog material! Yes! So here goes:

I haven’t gotten over the amazement of how little we all really know about how fast things are changing. From day to day, we realize that there are all these new things that we need to do, but don’t have any time to deal with. Take plain old communication, for instance. Now its Communications, plural with a capital “C”.

Communication used to mean plain old talking, face-to-face. Now, nobody wants to talk to one another. We have put “Social Media” in place to avoid actual contact. Avoidance has reached new heights.

Remember the old days? You picked up the phone (now known as a land line) and called someone. They answered. You both talked, you both communicated, you both were done. Everyone was up to speed. Occasionally, a secretary answered, took your message, and the other person called you back. Same result.

Then voicemail crept in. No human intervention with a little pink note and a verbal reminder to return a call. Easier to avoid communication.

Then eMail reared it’s electronically superior head. Wowie, a new set of excuses for not communicating were presented. “Oh gee, yeah, I guess I didn’t get your eMail because it must have went to my trash and got deleted and I was out of the office anyway and my computer crashed and I lost everything and I thought I answered it because it had the same subject as your previous eMail and I only check my eMail once a day blah blah blah.”

Then, cell phones were created so that we could now stay in constant touch with one another. Another, meaning: additional impediments to communicating. More voicemail. More call forwarding to other voicemail. Dropped calls, bad signals, bad batteries, faulty technology. And now we can see who’s calling us in advance, for us to avoid having to say “hello”, so we can let the call roll over into voicemail.

The solution? eMail, texting and Twitter on your cell phone. G3 technology. The world wide web on your iPhone or Blackberry. 24/7 communications that can be avoided 24/7. But selectively. Now we can leave messages for one another constantly, day or night, so that we might never have to actually talk to anyone again!

Where will it end? Science and technology will give us chips in our jawbones so that we can talk constantly all by ourselves to ourselves walking through the mall. You used to think that people who had the bluetooth headsets were just crazy people who talked to themselves as they walked around. I think some people now think that doing that makes them look really connected, so they really DO just walk around and talk to themselves, with something stuck in their ear to make it look like a headset.

When was the last time ANYONE wrote an actual letter to anyone else, except for lawyers and junkmail?

Could it be that, when the big sunspot hits the earth with a giant magnetic pulse and wipes out all communications, that we will stare at each other and not know what to say?

Well, let’s talk about it.

That’s what John, the Advertising Curmudgeon thinks.