Maybe Teddy Roosevelt, maybe Civil War General Little Phil Sheridan, maybe someone else, first said “When you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”

We’re not allowed to do that sort of thing anymore but the notion does capture the core element of great copywriting.

In polite society, where I’m an occasional visitor, the issue might be summarized more elegantly as “When you engage them on a visceral (gut-feel, instinctual, intuitive) level with an appeal to emotion and/or logic you’ll succeed.”

The best people at doing this are charities like SmileTrain and not-for-profits like the NRA. They’re not just good, they’re spectacular.

Companies in the big TV categories – automotive, beer, soda, financial, drug, chain restaurant, and technology – try hard with logic/emotion mixes but they fall short because there’s rarely any visceral element to the work. There used to be but it’s gone now. Chevrolet’s “See the USA …” campaign with Dinah Shore engaged Americans on the viscerally patriotic level. Now the closest we have to a visceral automotive approach is Kia’s hip hop hamsters series of spots.

Coke’s “I’d like to teach the world …” and Apple’s brilliant 1984 spot, got us in the gut.

We don’t see work like that very often and I think I know why. We’re so polarized that any gut issue, any appeal to a deeply held belief or set of values, will either zoom right over half the audiences’ heads or it’ll make them mad. So we wind up with commercials that don’t quite reach anyone at all. Worse, we get commercials that actually repel viewers like the recent J.C. Penny spots featuring the heart-wrenching, barf-inducing yells of people who, apparently, won’t be getting something. What? Who the hell knows? Who can watch long enough to find out? I guess visceral is a two-edged sword.

For years I wondered why anyone with an education would be a progressive, a single-issue activist, a socialist or a communist.

Then it hit me: Life’s easier if you’re a leftie.

In the leftie camp, you find that decisions are all made for you. You’re with people who feel exactly the same way about everything important. You don’t have to think or know anything. All your answers are provided free.

Best of all, you get to feel angelic and precious. You are one with the downtrodden, and the marginalized. You want to be fair. You want to do things for the children. You want to save the planet. You want to preserve resources for future generations. Not only do you achieve none of these, you make things worse. People who point this out are evil and you get to excoriate them at will. You win all arguments by sneering. You are saintly, they are satanic. You love yourself.

You get to pretend to be brave. Speaking truth to power. Standing up to the man. Your ego grows and glows whenever you pat yourself on the head.

You get to claim that your views are based on reason and science, yet all of your assertions are logically flawed, usually by ad hominem, straw man and/or appeal to authority.

You have one permanent Get-out-of-Jail-Free card that absolves you of anything, no matter how many lies and distortions you spew, no matter how disastrous the results of the programs you support, no matter how murderous and venal the people you back. Your card reads: “My intentions were pure.”

Being a leftie is like being a kid forever. You put on your dish towel cape and run around the back yard waving your super soaker, being a hero, and calling everyone else a villain, especially the people who make it possible for you to be a fool.

High end print ads in highfalutin magazines like the Atlantic appear to be just art directors’ playgrounds, but I suspect that something else is going on.

Copywriters supply blind headlines and rambling body copy which few people would read even if the designers didn’t render them practically illegible with small sans serif type.

Part of the problem is a little known fact of life in agency creative departments: most art directors think of copy as just another design element. That’s a good thing here because even if there were a point to any of the ads, it would be obscured by the faux cleverness of the copy. Let’s flip through the Atlantic (December 2011) to see what we can see.

Lockheed Martin has a double page spread, most of which is a night photo of a city bright with light. A headline over an intentionally darkened part of the image reads “A grid that’s more than smart” with the “more” in a different color and “than” and “smart” stacked vertically. The body copy is in sans serif type. There are but 6 sentences, 5 of them short. The long one, 21 words, reads “That’s why, at Lockheed Martin, we’re helping utilities modernize grid management by applying our expertise in cyber security and command control.” That’s probably the point of the ad, but it’s buried in the middle of hard to read body copy.

Lockheed Martin has nothing to do with creating or running a smart grid. It does help to protect grids, though. The reference to a grid that’s more than smart makes no more sense than a reference to an intelligent man who’s more than smart because he has a bodyguard.

In a British Airways single page ad, we see the gizzards of a machine that appears to be a large pear-shaped watch. There is no headline. But a bold lead to the body copy tells us that someone named Martin Wood (no photo of Martin) has been with British Airways for 20 years and the machine “is the back of his hand”. The first thought is that Martin has a mechanical hand, and that would be cool. Alas, a caption informs us that we are looking at a mere Integrated Drive Generator, one of roughly six million parts in a 747 airplane.

The conceit that the machine is the back of Martin’s hand is misleading. The truth is that Martin Wood knows this thing “like” the back of his hand. The light sans serif copy goes on to inform anyone who can read it that many of BA’s engineers have been with the company as long as Martin has. Wow.

The Conrad hotel chain has a full page ad with no body copy at all, just the logotype, the names of four continents plus the words “middle east”, and a TM-ed tag line that reads “the luxury of being yourself”. Apparently the best example of “being yourself” is a woman wearing a little black dress with a gold sash tied in a bow around her waist. She is walking across a lobby with a motorcycle helmet in her hand. (It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for her to try this in the middle east.) She’s not being herself at all; she’s being some art director’s idea of preciously cool.

The BMW Group has a semi-coherent ad on page 19. At least its body copy is in a serif face.

But on page 21, the same BMW Group scares the pants off us with an ad headed “The Coming Net-Zero City”. The image, a drawing, appears to be a couple of smallish multi-family dwellings made of cinder blocks and surrounded by a rudimentary fence.

It looks like the place in Abbottabad, Pakistan where the Navy Seals, God bless ‘em, took out bin Laden. Who on earth would want to live in this soulless dump? According to a caption in tiny, tiny type, the place actually exists. It was built in Chicago in 2009. They could have shown us a photo with some people in it and you have to wonder why they didn’t. There’s a ton of body copy, all of it in a small sans serif type that makes the words next to unreadable. Assuming you can struggle though the typography to grapple with the rambling copy, you will search in vain for a connection between the net-zero city and BMW. That’s because the connection is staring you in the face: BMW, a manufacturer of automobiles, gets to blame profligate energy use on something that doesn’t involve the internal combustion engine.

Why do companies bother with ads like these? Two reasons, I suspect, neither of which has anything to do with 99.9% of the readers of the magazine: 1) companies talk to themselves all the time and 2) occasionally they talk to tiny groups of decision influencers like unions, regulators, activists and our elected elite – none of whom read the magazine but will see the ads anyway. The companies will make sure they do.

Do you and I buy or keep buying things because of image advertising?

I used to, but no longer. Nowadays it’s a rare image ad that doesn’t make me wonder if a company has been taken over by the sophomore class of Oberlin College.

I first noticed the effect right after the last presidential election when J&R (an electronics store near City Hall in NYC) took out full page ads in local newspapers consisting entirely of a logo and a headline declaring “Change is good.” I laughed.

Most image advertising these days, while not as silly as J&R’s, is pure b.s., like Jennifer Lopez for Fiat or Lite (and Light) beer spots.

Uber-dopes spend scads of corporate bucks on environmental issues. BP had government and lawyer guns to its head after the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, so we can cut them a break, but what compelled Coca-Cola to start saving polar bears? There’s even a web site called the Coca-Cola Polar Bear Support Fund that contains these words: “Help us take action to reduce our human impact on global climate change.”

I know they’re in Atlanta, but they should know by now that the polar bears are fine. As grownups they should know that the human impact on global climate change (they mean global warming – climate change is gobbledygook) is not a big deal. Most of all they should know that the bubbles in Coca Cola are carbon dioxide which, sophomores at Oberlin believe, contributes mightily to “ … our human impact on global climate change.” This could bite Coke in the butt when the lunatics take over every corner of the asylum.

Image advertising, in theory anyway, is supposed to help create a positive feeling about a company and it’s not supposed to get people feeling like the character in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I suggest a moratorium, at least until grownups get back in charge.

Fiat is an Italian company that makes cars, mostly really small cars. Their TV commercial pretends to show Jennifer Lopez returning to her old Bronx neighborhood while spouting nonsense about her deep connection to these mean streets. She shot the spot in LA, of course. The notion that Lopez would drive one of these circus clown cars is an insult to viewers. In print, Fiat has a full page ad glorifying the smallness of the car with a photo and the headline “Bigger isn’t better. It’s just harder to park.” No body copy. Bigger isn’t better is an idiotic claim for a lot of reasons, the main one being that it’s not true. This is an ad for small cars, not Fiats. There are plenty of small cars, the even smaller Smart Car for instance. We can only hope that readers will compare Ease of parking to Death in a head on collision.

Volkswagen has been running an elaborate commercial wrapped around Elton John’s old hit “Rocket Man”. The commercial is about the available Fender sound system, which, apparently, helps you decipher the lyrics of Rocket Man. The actual car isn’t even an afterthought. Expensive sound system, no?

Dr. Pepper has a commercial about a product they call “Ten”. No clue why the name. The spot mocks the imagined macho sensibilities of men, showing them in terrifyingly stupid vignettes and then announcing that Ten is not for women. Only men. Sort of like Dennis the Menace’s tree house with its No Girls Allowed sign. In a way, it’s a stroke of genius; it manages to insult men and women at the same time.

Jaguar’s latest spot is a mock animal documentary entitled “Jaguar at Play”. The conceit is that the car is like the real wild cat and there’s a secret and gritty urban environment where the Jaguar plays in its time off. We sneak up on a lot of differently colored Jaguar cars racing around, perhaps hunting for Jennifer Lopez and her Fiat. The implication is that there are no humans involved. The singular subject in “Jaguar at Play” is odd because there are a lot of cars. A real documentary would, of course, say “Jaguars”, plural, but we can’t be messing with the brand, can we? Too late. This brand has been messed with for years, first by bad design then by calling it Jag-you-are. The combination of upper class twit Brit nonsense, implied wildness and inner city hipness is hilarious.

The Droid Razr, a smart phone is “too powerful to fall into the wrong hands.” The right hands being people with enough money to pay for it.

In a nod to the warm sentimentality of the Christmas season, Best Buy decided on a series of commercials that pit mothers against Santa Claus. The mothers buy better stuff at Best Buy and, unlike Santa’s, their gifts can be returned. The Moms confront Santa on Christmas Eve to one-up the old dude, not with humor or charm but with smugness and a nasty sneer. Santa is suitably chagrined. The tag line is “Game on, Santa.” Chico Marx was right, there is no sanity clause.

Macy’s sneaks up on Christmas with a full page ad in the New York Post today for a line of “scents” – cologne, perfume and such – called “Villain” from tattoo “artist” Ed Hardy. More thuggery. Charming.

These advertisers wouldn’t spend all the money they have invested in this crap if they didn’t think it would work. That’s kind of sad. There’s something seriously amiss in America’s collective brain and soul if it does work.

Conflate means to join two or more things into a unified whole. It’s from the Latin for “blow together”.

It used to happen a lot in ad agencies with DM divisions. Because ads and direct mail both rely on words and images, the ad people, control freaks all, insisted on being involved in the DM creative. We ignored them as best we could; when we couldn’t, we’d ask them to sign a form that they were responsible for the results. Oooh, they hated that.

Government control-freak-regulators conflate all the time. It’s their dirtiest trick. They blow together two issues, usually one bad and one fairly harmless, then cover the mess with verbal smoke.

They conflate bad guys with good guys on the gun issue. Bad guys use guns for holdups, drive by shootings, murders, massacres, and so on. Guns bad. Good guys use guns to defend themselves, save lives, and prevent rapes and mugging. Doesn’t matter, guns bad. All guns bad, guns must go.

The notion of human-caused global warming via carbon emissions didn’t get much traction until Al Gore and other assorted liars, all of whom should be ashamed of themselves, conflated it with pollution and got the EPA to agree. Pollution bad. Global warming bad. Then, once they realized that the earth warms and cools all the time and isn’t currently warming, they super-conflated the whole issue into Climate Change, which they know is a) inevitable and b) impossible to confirm or deny while it’s happening, if it’s happening.

Now they’re trying to do it with cell phones. It took them a while because there was no evidence that talking on a cell phone while driving was any more dangerous than talking to a passenger or singing along with Elvis Costello. Nonetheless, nine states banned it anyway. New York State banned it despite in-state research demonstrating that talking on the phone while driving did not contribute to an increase in accidents. Then along came texting. A lot of idiots text while driving and the inevitable happens. Texting is done on cell phones, so cell phones bad.

They did it with the simple concept of equality of opportunity by conflating it with equality of results. Then they plugged that lunacy into our education and finance systems with disastrous results. Now they’re doing it to our armed forces and fire departments with lethal results.

They’ve conflated illegal immigrants with legal immigrants so they’re all now all just immigrants, which is sort of like saying Al Capone and Eliot Ness were in the same business.

Race and country of origin as well as race and religion are currently undergoing conflation. There’s no such race as, say, Mexican but if you have a problem with illegal immigrants from Mexico, you a) don’t like immigrants and b) you’re a racist. There’s no such race as Moslem, but … you get the idea. With amazing mental gymnastics, the regulators somehow deconflated Orientals and other non-white races when it comes to college admissions.

Why do they do this? Mostly for the same reason anyone does anything – because they can. Also, because it gives them power over a society that, for the most part, holds them in deep contempt.

Perhaps it’s time we conflated them with their soul brothers – Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Chavez, Mao, Pol Pot and Michael Bloomberg. But we won’t. Unlike direct marketers, we don’t insist that anyone be held responsible for results of meddling.

Bumper stickers fascinated copywriters back when they were funny or even just corny.

You still see them down south: EARTH FIRST! We’ll stripmine the other planets later … Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes … Give me ambiguity or give me something else … You’re just jealous because the voices are talking to me and not you! … Forget world peace. Visualize using your turn signal.

But nowadays most of them are just tedious, mainly because they’re nasty – or precious, which is the same thing only with patchouli oil. I blame modern leftie brains. They just can’t help themselves.

Driving in Miami the other day, I saw an otherwise immaculate Toyota SUV with a single bumper sticker that read: “PMS Allows a Woman Once a Month to Act Like Men Do Everyday.”

Besides being drivel, it’s badly written and semi-illiterate – everyday, in this context, should be two words: every day. But mostly it’s a stupid, vicious lie on two counts, one lie about women and the other about men.

Most women with PMS don’t act all that badly. Hinting that they do is sexist, otherwise none of them could get jobs.

The other lie is dumber. Very few men act anything like the deranged PMSing bitch of fiction and the ones who do get punched out pretty regularly. The woman driving the little SUV probably thought the PMS sentiment was funny, preciously funny, and that’s the problem. It’s not only not funny, it’s repulsive. And, of course, viciously sexist.

Bumper stickers used to be more fun, even with lies. My favorite was on a pickup truck in Tampa:

It should be “really slow” but it scans better without the –ly. The lie is that old people are a special pain in the butt on Florida’s roads. They’re not, at least not compared to all the fine young morons.

Graffiti is bumper stickers for people who don’t have cars. I’ve always been a Republican, but I laughed when I saw that someone had scrawled “Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You” on a wall. The leftie brains tried it with Cheney but it didn’t work.

When people drove around with “Jesus is the answer” on their bumpers, someone came up with: “Jesus is the answer; the question is ‘What do you say when you accidentally rap yourself in the nuts?’”

The worst bumper sticker of all time is that idiotic Coexist thing with the word made up of symbols. It’s in the imperative voice, a command, so the immediate reaction is “F&*% You!”

The sentiment is sternly sophomoric and the target audience is all wrong because the bumper sticker is in English. It means nothing to the perpetually outraged, largely non-English-speaking, people who refuse to coexist with anyone, not even themselves, most of the time.

The dopiest was 1970’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, which was part of the “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” and “You Can Have It All” insanity. None of it was ever true as we now know from the alarming pathologies traced to single parenthood. The fish/bicycle trope wasn’t even original. An Australian college student named Irina Dunn scrawled it on a bathroom door but she’d just adapted it from something she’d read in school that day.

You can use the form for anything, as in “The Republic needs Obama like a fish needs a bicycle.” Wait a minute, that’s actually true.

The NY Post had an interesting little story early last week. Edited down, it said this:

The average household headed by a person over 64 has a net
worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone
under 35, according to an analysis of census data. That’s double
what it was in 2005 and five times what it was 25 years ago.

For some reason I thought of Willie Sutton, the old-school bank robber who said that he robs banks “… because that’s where the money is.” (And if he didn’t say it, he should have.)

We marketers are supposed to be like that. Assuming that we don’t do marketing as a hobby, you’d think we’d pay some attention to where the money is.

But apparently a lot of us don’t; most consumer marketing seems to be directed where the money ain’t, at younger folks even though the difference in “net worth” isn’t a gap, it’s a yawning chasm.

True, some marketing is aimed at geezers. Viagra, for instance, and denture cream, Medicare supplement insurance, help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up, AARP, motorized wheelchairs, Craftmatic beds … ah, to heck with it. This is all nickel and dime stuff compared to, say, the ad budgets just for light beers.

I suspect that there are two main reasons why so much more money is spent on the under 35s. One is that most client marketers are under 35 themselves. The other is that older folks are very hard to snow. They’re allergic to b.s. and that’s why most ads targeting seniors are in the form of benefit-driven direct marketing, regardless of medium, and why they show no signs of “aren’t-we-just-the coolest” syndrome.

What with a gazillion boomers about to become geezers, the wealthiest geezer cohort of all time, we might want to start paying attention. Or not, if being cool is more important than actual selling.

Judging by some of the spots we see these days, very nasty, indeed.

A State Farm commercial features Jerry & Jessica talking on the phone. Jessica, unruffled, sits behind her desk. Jerry stands beside his car in a street somewhere. The car’s a wreck. It didn’t just hit a pole, it climbed it. Jerry’s calling Jessica because she used to be his car insurance agent. Used to be! So he’s calling just to vent. Sadly, she can’t help him the way she had helped him all the other times he demolished his car. She guesses that he hit a pole again. (The guy’s premiums must be $50,000 a month by now.) He starts to cry. “I miss you, Jessica.” Unlike the women in the rest of today’s Hall of Shame commercials, at least Jessica’s nice.

An AT&T commercial opens with a middle-aged woman puttering in a small greenhouse. Her husband peeks in to announce that he’s arranged some kind of unlimited messaging deal and she sneeringly asks him where the money will come from and did he think of consulting his wife. She vents a bit more then mutters that her mother was right. She should have married the other guy. Devastated, the poor husband pleads that whatever it is is free. The woman’s face assumes an “Ohmigawd, I’ve done it again” look.

A company called PCMatic will find and fix viruses automatically online. Their commercial shows a helpless husband completely at a loss because his computer might have a virus but his brilliant wife immediately comes to the dolt’s rescue then grabs the car keys and splits because it’s girls’ night out. The eunuch will stay home.

McDonald’s gets into the act with a spot touting the return of its McRib sandwich. Several people enjoying the sandwich send a photo of their bacchanal to a guy about to leave on his honeymoon. Oh no, he laments, staring at the image on his phone, he’s going to miss the McRib. The new bride snarks “I married a 14-year old.”

There’s a more subtly nasty genre best exemplified, perhaps, by a ubiquitous Ace Hardware commercial that appears to ape every troop-rallying speech in movie history, especially Mel Gibson’s in Braveheart. A guy on a child’s bicycle – he’s wearing a loopy helmet, of course – pedals slowly back and forth in front of a large group of his suburban neighbors exhorting them to go to Ace. He sounds like a child speaking in hero-voice. It’s a serious commercial, not at all funny, that infantilizes dozens of grownups. Ace is an equal opportunity offender, though. There are women in the crowd and in another version of the commercial, a woman plays Braveheart.

Is it possible that clients actually write creative briefs instructing their agencies to “Make our target audience look like idiots/wimps/ harridans/castratos/ morons/ pseudo macho dolts”? If not, how did these nasty commercials ever see the light of day?

If the answer’s what I think it is, then why do some of today’s marketers hold their customers in such deeply malicious contempt?