:: Advertising: ce n'est pas tres cool ::

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Remember when you were in elementary school, junior high, and/or high school, and you had an English teacher who instructed: "show, don't tell" in your writing? Instead of saying "Enrique is sad", you were supposed to inspire the reader to come to a more nuanced realization by writing "Enrique has droopy eyes. Enrique is lying on the ground weeping. Enrique has written a poignant suicide note."

[as an aside, I always though there were some situations where simply stating someone's condition would be more effective. Instead of saying "Enrique is experiencing periodic bouts of vomiting, stomach cramping, and diarrhea", why not say "Enrique has cholera"?]

At work today, I reviewed an ad from a wireless carrier which stated: "The [name of phone] is tres cool."

Excuse me? "Tres cool"? (this was not a French company) Why might that be? They certainly didn't take the time to describe the phone (the bulk of the ad was devoted to selling the service plan), nor why I might consider it tres cool, mucho cool, hyper cool, max cool, or uber cool.

This is the same problem I have sometimes with Steven Spielberg as a director. Instead of setting up the scene to invoke emotion, he arranges it so that the cinematography, score, acting, and dialogue are outrageously bombastic in an effort to inculcate the viewer with the desired emotion. This becomes counterproductive and ineffective. The audience cannot be made to experience genuine feeling when they are conscious that someone is trying to manipulate them.

Emotion and opinion cannot be spontaneously transferred to someone. The two must be reached through persuasion. When you are trying to convince someone, whether it be in causal conversation or a rhetorically stringent debate, you simply can't say "you must now be of opinion x". You must present persuasive evidence to direct someone to the desired conclusion. Never tell someone what they should think - tell them why they should think that. Don't tell me that the phone is "tres cool" (quotation marks connote sarcasm). Sell it to me. Make me think to myself: "Self, that phone is tres cool."

Or, in other words: show, don't tell.

Posted by morland @ 06:17 PM

:: Comments ::

Ah, but remember the truth effect. If you repeat something enough times, it simply becomes true to the casual observer.

A simple, absolute statement is easier and often more striking than a reasoned argument, and when repeated ad nauseum, people will eventually find themselves walking around saying "Oh yeah, i hear that phone is, like, tres cool... or something."

Posted by: Scott Ganz on July 31, 2002 10:59 PM

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