Friday, July 8, 2005

When I got a stack of business cards today, 2″ x 3.5″ affairs that will inform my name and current allegiances for months to come, it occurred to me the sociable distribution of these cards is a kind of business puberty. Instinctively I’d share–and share gregariously, mind you–my cards with the landfill, but I’d wager this isn’t the most reasonable use of company dollars, nor would Forbes magazine spare me an approving look.

The grown-ups trade cards at an expo called AD:TECH, cradle and darling of the online advertising industry. Charitably speaking, it’s a tornado of dorks masked by obnoxious capital letters. Uncharitably speaking, guess who’s contributing to the tornado?

“Are you interested in going to a conference?” asked my boss this Wednesday.

“I don’t really have a burning desire to go, no,” I started, “but if it’ll help–“

“I think you’re going.”

That’s my Monday. I’ve been immersed in the online ad world for a total of three years now, and I still believe it’s an industry built on ether and broken dreams. The Webiverse is amorphous, powerful, probably uncontrollable, but that doesn’t deter my peers from doggedly attempting to yoke it to their dark purposes. And boy, do some of them take it seriously.

“I’m always looking to establish synergies between different companies,” a would-be client told me on the phone recently.

Moses’s toes, please pull your hands out of your pants. We’re neither saving nor slaughtering whales here. Jargon is one way to cope with something massive, I suppose, and my tendency is to try to define it.

Here it is, my “academic” definition of advertising. It’s the communicative reconciliation between truth and profit. You have a product. You could keep it squirreled away in a warehouse, hoping a select few will happen upon it and loudly sing its praises and proselytize it to the ends of the earth. This is probably not going to happen, however, so you’ve got to convey the merits, real or imagined, of your item.

Real or imagined, there’s the rub. Ever wonder why Rolls-Royce doesn’t purchase 30-second spots, yet the combination deep fryer and ceramic figurine rack warrants a 60-minute infomercial? The most effective advertising, I’d argue, balances truth with the bottom line. Perhaps this is why people are ready to torch the local church at the mere mention of online ads, because there’s a lot of imagination on the Interweb, possibly glorious reservoirs of synergite as well.

I was going to ask you to put me out of my misery, should I ever publish screeds about the industry. Now look at what I’ve gone and done.