The Zeitgeist Meets Your Pants

Who are you, and aren't you better than this?

There's a game I'm playing right now.
 
It's called Guess The Me-Too TV Advertiser. 
 
Is it Google?
 
Is it Apple?
 
Is it Cotton?
 
Is it someone else who can't figure out how to look different in the calamitous face of the pandemic zeitgeist?
 
 
Gesundheit!
 
The word "zeitgeist" comes to us from those comic geniuses of 18th-century German philosophy.
 
It's most closely associated with that laughmeister himself, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Fact: Hegel was quite a dancer.

Hegel is best known for such quips as, "We learn from history that we do not learn from history," and "Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable."
 
It was always fun having Herr Hegel at the philosophers' cocktail party.
 
He'd quaff one too many weissbiers and start coming up with timeless banter like, "If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die." And everyone would laugh and laugh!
 
But I digress.
 
A word referring to the spirit of the age, "zeitgeist" translates literally as "time ghost."
 
Which is fitting.
 
 
So much advertising right now is the faintest ghost of its former, smarter self...
 
Granted, it's hard to produce new advertising at the moment. 

You can't get a group of people together in a room to do much of anything related to commerce.
 
But that shouldn't prevent better writing.
 
Last week, we gave props to Budweiser. They've resurrected and then reimagined the "Whassup!" commercial for these uncertain times without ever using a phrase like "these uncertain times."
 
 
There has never been a time of certainty.
 
So that phrase should go into the dumpster of hackneyed copywriting and be lit on fire.
 
In a time when everyone's stressed out, it only makes sense to be sensitive to the zeitgeist.
 
But it's also good to remember that nobody needs ongoing reminders of how bad things are.
 
It's gotten so ridiculous, ad agency owner/Creative Director/cartoonist David T. Jones has created a new font: Times Uncertain. (You can download it here at his agency website: https://www.takethirdstreet.com/times-uncertain)
 
 
Better than reminders of the badness is reassurance of our badass best.
 
Maybe it's not a good time for comedy.
 
But it is a good time for humor.
 
At the very least, it's a good time for reaffirming the character and the spirit that defines good people in a crisis.
 
Without being partisan or political, I'm going to steal from the late, great Hal Riney.
 
Ready?
 
It's morning in America.
 
It's up to us to decide what kind of a day we're going to make it.
 
And better writing will help.
 
Like Mary Heaton Vorse said in one of the best single quotes about how to do this thing with words, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."
 
It's hard.
 
And so worth it.

Cheers,
Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in
Park City