The Rational Anthem
If Bernbach and Ogilvy and Gossage were all to come back, they would all be baffled by the lack of scientific progress in the last 20 years in terms of understanding how communication works, why it works and how to make it better.There’s quite a lot of evidence now that suggests that entertaining and likeable ads work, and yet in many cases you have clients who believe that ads work through persuasion and rational argument, not through seduction. Clients like this are making ads less likeable, less amusing and less effective in the belief that they are actually making them better, and that is a terrible, terrible waste of effort.
A really disturbing waste of effort.
The rational argument is easy to defend in a meeting. Seduction is not.
So the thing that gets cut is usually the attractive thing that was working.
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
Rationality is for the parts of the world that behave.
Attention is not one of them. Neither is taste, or amusement, or anything else people choose first and justify later.