Jim Morris - Badvertising

A highly creative spirit and fresh perspective.

DENNIS O'CONNELL,
former executive vice president and
director of Beyond DDB Chicago and
adjunct professor at West Virginia University

The kind of writing that makes the outer edges of the brain tingle.
Smart, provocative, and often hilarious.

DAVID LITTLEJOHN,
founding partner of Humanauts

Morris's writing is smart, honest and engaging. I read him not just for
business but for pleasurean increasingly rare combination.

MARK DIMASSIMO,
creative director of Digo Brands

This edition first published in 2021 by Career Press, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

65 Parker Street, Suite 7

Newburyport, MA 01950

www.careerpress.com

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2021 by Jim Morris

Foreword copyright 2021 by Drew Eric Whitman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-63265-184-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck

Cover photograph iStock.com

Interior by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Typeset in Berthold Akzidenz and Neutraface Slab Text

Printed in the United States of America

IBI

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www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

To the Flintstones Kids,
Ten Million Strong
and Growing

IT'S A FACT. Most advertising is C-R-A-P.

Read that again. I didn't say a lot of advertising is crap. I said most of it is crap. So when the publisher shot me an email asking if I would be interested in writing the foreword for Jim Morris's new book, Badvertising, I happily agreed. Jim's a legend in the industry, so I was honored to be a part of his great work.

If you've read my own book, Cashvertising, you know that Jim and I share a hatred for lousy ads. Jim calls it Badvertising. That's polite. In private conversation, we call it crapvertising. That's becauseas Jim fittingly exemplifies in this bookhorrible ads share what I call a one-flush-fits-all mindset. This fascinating brain condition takes most any product or service and magically transforms its features and benefits into a mind-numbingly stupid, boring, or insulting ad that quickly gets approved with just a few rattling nods of CEO's skulls.

In Cashvertising, I teach how to use ad-agency psychology to help you sell more stuff. In Badvertising, Jim makes you aware of all the cerebral dysfunctions that are responsible for creating ads that do nothing but first make you look foolish while you obliviously waste money, then make you wonder why on earth they didn't work, and finally cause you to repeat the same foolish errorslike a fish biting a different, but equally sharp, hook.

Our goal for ad pros is to put you years ahead of your peers by wisely not following in their footsteps. Result? You'll create more profitable ads... and faster. For consumers, it's to help you better understand why you're fast-forwarding through more commercials than you watchand to encourage you to shoot emails to companies whose ads particularly annoy you, in the hope that consumer feedback will knock some sense into them. And for prospective ad-industry candidates, it's to arm you against those you're sure to battle when you sit in your first ad-agency chairor, alternatively, to convince you to take a chair in a different industry altogether!

If you both loveand love to hateadvertising as much as I do, you'll love Badvertising. Jim filled its pages the way a master chocolatier fills his deliciously sweet truffles. Every page is a real treat for those who love the industryor at least the better examples of its deliciously persuasive craft.

You'll marvel at creative-industry numbskullness through scores of ridiculous (and oh-so-common) real-life examples of corporate thinking that causes big important company heads to make truly stupid-head decisions. In fact, many of the examples had me laughing out loud. Just wait until you read Jim's range of severity pharmaceutical example. What a howl! Others made me grunt in pain, forcing me to recall my own similar experiences. From dealing with clients who hate everything (but don't know why and/or can't express it) to pompous CEOs whose (money-flushing) creative ideas could only be appreciated by their own mothers, Jim exposes them all.

I nearly fell on the floor after reading the insane brand name that Jim's law-firm client dreamed up after his agency had toiled over the project for eight weeks and presented many fine suggestions. Egads! It left me wondering how that client had the capacity to make it safely to work each morning.

In Jim's chapter on Overthink, he describes focus-group testing as opportunities for those who like to imagine themselves as the target audience. They're not! In fact, advertising execs care more about their dumb little ads than 99 percent of those who'll ultimately see them. Truth is, nobody cares about your ad. They care only about what your product or service will do for them, not the cleverness of the copywriting and graphics in your ads. When you create an ad, you do your best job, wish it well, and send it out into the marketplace. Then consumers (not your family members, your co-workers, or pompous award-winning creative directors) tell you how great your ad is (or not) by responding and buying your stuff (or not).

In Jim's section on Executive Blindness, you'll see how ad execs get so caught up in the process of advertising that they lose sight of their original purposeto sell. They fill their sails with such windbaggery that the product itself gets lost in waves of creative stupidity. For example, wait until you read what one beer company proclaims to be their purpose for existence. Not to sell beer, of course. Perish the thought! That would be too grounded in reality. Too lacking in drama. Too, er, true!

Badvertising is incisive and daring. And it's the only book you need to understand both the inner workings of America's ad agencies and the minds of those who never cease to astound us with their creative genius and their profound stupidity. Jim will keep you laughing, groaning, and scratching your head from cover to cover. After just one reading, you'll never see advertising the same way again.