We need to resurrect insult, kids. I don’t mean we should insult each other any more than we already do. I mean it’s time to be more cognizant of being insulted when we are.
Exhibit A: “A Contrarian View on Innovation in Advertising & PR“:
I actually take a contrarian point of view: innovation has slowed in media technology. We’re at the tail end of our current technological revolution’s lifecycle, moving past the discontinuous revolution and into the iterative evolution.
If we’re not insulted by that kind of claptrap, we should be. Forget about the fallacy of innovation. Set aside the smoke and mirrors of media technology. But don’t miss the opportunity to be royally ripped at the gibberish of moving past the discontinuous revolution and into the iterative evolution. What?
That post took 718 words to tell us what we could have been told in three: We’re storytellers again. Here are 61 of those words:
Great creative has always been about great storytelling. Now we just tell that story across new media platforms/channels in partnership with the new social influencers and in partnership with our customers. Sometimes those influencers and customers are the same. Great creative (‘the story’) is the glue that holds the story together, wherever we’re telling it. It’s what inspires people to participate.
[INSERT PRIMAL SCREAM HERE]
Do we really need people to keep telling us this? Depending on how generous (or skeptical) you’re feeling today, the argument can be made that we’ve been around a hell of a long time. And we’ve been telling stories, in one form or another, for much of that time.
We’re not storytellers again. We’re storytellers still. We’ve always been storytellers. We always will be. I’m telling you a story right now.
Given our pathological predilection for amnesia, as a result of which we can’t remember anything from election cycle to election cycle, it’s no wonder we can’t recall a few hundred thousand years of our own lineage. But we’re not talking about recollection here. We’re talking about our very nature.
We don’t need to be reminded that we’re storytellers. And we don’t have to put up with some dude’s trying to pass himself off as a contrarian for reminding us.
If we’re not insulted by this kind of convolution, we should be. It’s time.
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Image by Pezibear, courtesy of pixabay.com.