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.