What is Good Advertising

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In describing The Elements of Style, Morgan Meis said,

“language is simple, direct, and expressive… except that it's magical, dynamic, and unfettered. [E.B.] White looks at Thomas Paine's famous sentence, "These are the times that try men's souls." He tries switching it around to, "Times like these try men's souls." It crashes to the ground. Why? We simply do not know. No explanation seems adequate…The first sentence is better and we damn well know it. We don't know why. But we know it, as certain as the hand in front of one's face, the rain falling on the plain.”

I mentioned a shitty derivative execution by Trident with Single Girls, or better known as the mass marketing death knell of the manufactured flash mob.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLj5zphusLw&w=545&h=330]

But why exactly is the Trident video so painful to watch when the T-Mobile ad that begat it is such a pleasure?

We could say that great advertising tends to be the most original. Except T-Mobile was fantasticly thievish, just a little higher up the food chain.

So what does make great advertising? Or great anything? How would you describe something that’s good versus something that’s not, be it movies, television shows, a blog post or a letter to the editor.

Obviously, it depends heavily on the context. TV shows need great acting, or cinematography, emotive writing, whatever. But none of them are the sum of those parts, and generally, the things that work simply have an indescribable spark. And usually that just means they are the product people whose tastes and temperament tend make sparks happen.

In other words, some people got it, and some people don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually the people who outwork and outthink and outunderstand that are the people that "got it." So it probably has less to do with something bestowed from above and more to do with the hustle to make it work.

It’s the people who are able to find the simplicity in a message, without sacrificing the threads of magic and complexity that keep it interesting.