Curatives wanted

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

• When judges make mistakes they lock them up.
• When surgeons make mistakes they bury them.
• When ad people make mistakes they run them on national TV, tweet them and post them on Facebook.
• Judges enjoy the luxury, if you will, of having high barriers to entry to their profession.
• Law school et al.
• You won’t get to occupy the bench by watching Suits or Damages.
• Or by reading John Grisham novels.
• Surgeons?
• There’s no way to become one other than grinding through college and residencies for a good, grueling 10 years.
• At least.
• Full time.
• Not even nurses who’ve witnessed thousands of surgical procedures have the professional clearance to operate on a patient.
• It’d be outright illegal.
• Advertising?
• It’s easier to become a creative or account exec than, say, a plumber.
• You need to be certified & insured to be a plumber.
• Being an ad executive poses no hoops to jump through other than… owning a laptop?
• Suffice it to say that the under signer, yes, yours truly, used to be a… professor…? at the very HQ of the prestigious, world-renowned Miami Ad School.
• Anyone can write a script for a TV spot or pre-roll.
• Not to mention a tweet, a Facebook post or the proverbial tagline.
• Design & art direction software is becoming easier to operate by the hour.
• It used to be a craft reserved for classically educated artists.
• Now, it’s the field of self-taught teenagers.
• Ditto writing computer code.
• Filming, editing, CGI?
• Well, there’s an app for that.
• Our profession, if we can call it so, has the lowest barriers to entry one can imagine.
• It’s gone DIY all the way.
• The average human being is exposed to thousands of commercial messages everyday day.
• Why can’t he or she make he or her own?
• Millions of people self-medicate on a daily basis, for God’s f*****g sake.
• What holds them back from creating their own ads?
• After all, we humans learn from observation.
• I have never seen a surgical procedure of any kind.
• Even when I was physically present in the operating room, I was asleep or high as a kite.
• I saw thousands of ads though.
• They all look the same.
• Some anonymous actor or celebrity says something about a product or pretends to use it.
• An existential orgasm ensues.
• The anonymous actor or celeb has seemingly never experienced such an amazing SUV / snack / insurance / burger / mobile gadget.
• A voice-over closes the pitch with some inane tagline ripped from a self-help bestseller plus a call2action.
• Logo.
• Oh no, that paradigm is dead.
• We don’t bribe actors or celebs anymore to sell our wares.
• Well, I mean, we now call them influencers and they deliver their scripted lines on social media feeds.
• There go the barriers to entry.
• The floodgates are open, folks.
• When I started out as a copywriter, someone thought it was reasonable to pay some 20something snarky-pants six figures to come up with, say, ten plausible storylines for TV spots and 20 decent lines of copy for print purposes.
• Per month.
• Today, we need to do that every day: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine.
• We’ve said it all.
• Again & again.
• No matter how we slice it, the message hasn’t changed, the litany is the same.
• On multiple, mind-boggling social media feeds.
• Speaking of which, here’s the good news.
• Now more than ever, the medium is the message.
• McLuhan’s mantra is truer than it ever was.
• Let the new platforms shape your message.
• Don’t run magazine ads on Instragram.
• Don’t run TV spots on Vine.
• Don’t run slogans on Twitter.
• There’s nothing to “create” anymore (if there ever was).
• To borrow the pretentious verbiage of the art world, we now simply curate what already exists.
• We’ve become “curatives”, for the sake of coining a catchy idiom.
• Our job is to keep our ear to the ground, spot trends, identify pipelines & windows of access into the culture.
• It’s all out there.
• We just need to see it first.
• There’s nothing to invent.
• To paraphrase the Hollywood saying: “nobody knows anything”.
• In our racket we should adapt it to “nobody creates anything.”
• Anyone who says they do, well, they is lyin’.
• In ya face.
• Shamelessly.
• Programmatic?
• It’s just the flavor of the month.
• It’ll fall victim of the law of diminishing returns, like everything else.
• Like AOL, like Yahoo!, like Facebook.
• We will just become immunized and we’ll need to find something else.
• Not for the faint of heart.
• Only humans with a sweet tooth for risk can do it.