JUNE 14, 2026
ADVERTISING AND THE MESSINESS OF REALITY
This post is based on the introduction to my book "The Three Word Brief"
Nothing human works as advertised.
I'm astonished when people are surprised at the failures of capitalism, or socialism, or communism. I'm amazed when people are stunned that Democratic policies don't work. Or Republican policies. Or liberal policies, or conservative policies.
I'm astounded when people express dismay that corporations are stupid, or government is wasteful.
I laugh when I hear people complain that economists were wrong, or that an education scheme didn't pan out, or that a social policy had the opposite of its intended effect.
How much history do we have to read until we realize that there is no guaranteed right way to do things? Mostly, just different wrong ways.
How many failures does it take to realize that social systems devised by humans never seem to work as advertised? The longer a system survives, the more obvious its flaws become. It's like the slight wobble of a top. The longer it spins the worse it gets. The best we can do is to identify the systems that wobble the least.
We exist in a world of delusions. Our delusions live inside us and color everything we do. They infect our opinions of who we are. They distort our place in the world, twist our behaviors, and warp our sense of reality. Like the proverbial fish in the ocean, we are so immersed in delusions we can't even sense they are there.
We are very good at filtering out information that does not fit neatly into our vision of the world. “We can’t cope otherwise” says James Glieck, author of Chaos (and the famous ‘butterfly effect’), Genius, and The Information.
The business of advertising is particularly rife with delusions. We think we know how advertising works. We think we know what will motivate people and what will not. And yet every day we unconsciously filter out compelling evidence that we don’t really know much at all.
After months of research and testing we create a brilliant advertising strategy -- only to find it has little to no effect. We cancel it and try something else. Then we try something else. So many brands are on a continuous carousel of strategy changes and ad replacements.
We go into presentations and make bold, cocksure statements about our own particular brand of advertising philosophy. And we never have the guts or self- assurance to tell the truth -- that all our posturing is just an informed guess at likelihoods and a speculation on probabilities.
Part of this is our fault. We are not willfully deceitful. We just don't know. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're not. We find it very hard to admit that we are devoting so much of our energy and our soul to something about which we really understand so little.
Part of it is the environment. Marketers want results. They don't want to hear that they are spending millions of dollars on likelihoods and probabilities. They want results - and they want 'em now.
Advertising is chock full of contingencies and unintended effects. There are a thousand ways ad strategies can go wrong. There are a thousand ways creative executions can go wrong. Many of them are beyond our control.
We cannot possibly assess all the variables in a methodical way. So we fall back on our beliefs and our models of how advertising works. In other words, we call forth our delusions.
The workings of the real world are impossibly complex and messy. And in advertising, as in every other human endeavor, as Glieck says, we "prefer to turn a blind eye to reality’s messiness."
