Advertising's Final Solution

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Recycled Friday in which I take a well-deserved day off and recycle posts of the past. This one is from about a year ago.

Good news!

We no longer need creative people in advertising.

We can finally get rid of those annoying, whiney, pains-in-the-ass.

According to The New York Times there's a new software program developed by an agency called BETC Euro RSCG,  that can generate advertising by itself.

But before we get to the software, let's talk about the agency for a minute.

Does an agency really need 8 initials? I mean, the whole name is only twelve letters long -- BETC Euro RSCG. And eight of them are initials. Maybe their software program could have created a better name.

Well, anyway, according to the Times, this program can generate up to 200,000 "perfectly acceptable" ads for print, billboards, or banners. This sounds to me like an improvement because, honestly, I've seen a lot of banner ads that were perfectly awful, but I don't think I've ever seen one that was perfectly acceptable.

Now that computers can write and design ads, we can get down to the real business of advertising -- you know, meetings and downloads and uploads and briefings and off-sites and powerpoints and metrics and brand audits and deep dives.

We don't have to pretend we're in a "creative" business anymore. We can just do the things we're good at -- imitation anthropology, sidewalk psychology, strategy torturing, and data misinterpretation.

No more of that so-called "creativity" bullshit.