George Parker: No One Reads Ad Copy, and Other Chestnuts!

I was reading the blog of a famous new media “pundit” the other day, when I stumbled across the statement everyone in the communications business has repeatedly heard since time immemorial… “No one reads ad copy.” I will give the “pundit” a certain license to suggest that might be true when applied to some of the newer forms of digi-baloney floating around the ether, and yes, I am talking about Twitter, ‘cos with a limit of 140 characters, to paraphrase dear old Gertrude Stein, there’s not much there there… Although, by the time the dedicated “Twitterati” have pounded out thousands of words in their every waking hour; who knows, like the thousand monkeys locked in a room with their thousand typewriters, they might end up writing War & Peace.

But, I’m not here to bash Twitter (again). No, I’m here to find out if that statement is correct now, because I certainly don’t think it was in the past. Are we progressing (or regressing) to a primarily visual form of communication? Is the written word becoming a thing of the past? I know that the way people, and particularly kids, text in an abbreviated shorthand is common now, but will that devolve into a kind of pidgin English acceptable in the marble halls of corporate America? God knows, they speak biz-gibberish now and use Power Point as a communications crutch to avoid having to say anything they might be questioned on later.

But don’t get me wrong here; I am not suggesting we use twenty words when ten will suffice. One of my favorite stories is about Winston Churchill, who when he was appointed the First Lord of the Admiralty shortly before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, sent a memo to the several hundred Admirals in the British navy. It read… “Prey tell me the current state of the British navy, and please do it on one side of one sheet of paper!” How many people have you worked with who would more than likely implode when faced with that request?

Yet we also hear that more people are buying books and frequenting libraries than ever, although the increased use of libraries is also a reflection on the current state of the economy. Meantime newspapers and magazines are falling like flies. Yes, they are going digital, but until someone comes up with a business model that encourages users to pay for content, slashing overhead alone won’t get the job done.
So what will? Dumbing everything down to the point where even the average MySpace user can understand your pearls of wisdom? I don’t think so, ‘cos I don’t give a shit what the pundit thinks. Howard Gossage said it best… “People don’t read ads; they read what they are interested in. Sometimes that’s an ad.” It’s all about content, always has been, always will be. You can come up with the next digirati – 2.0 – social – wazoo. If you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, no one will listen. ‘Cos there are plenty of choices out there. Including the public library.

George Parker is a guest columnist for psfk.com. He the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, which is without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. He is the author of MadScam and his new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, which is currently setting the ether ablaze (and which you can order now on Amazon). He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.