A powerful ad is easy, a good one isn’t

2014-07-22 Daniel Community Aspects, Doing Science, Generating Ideas, Improving your Creativity, Inspiration, Learning to do Science, People, Realizing Creative Projects, Science 0

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
“Crown’s Book of Political Quotations” by Stephen Butler Leacock, quoted in Michael Jackman 1982

There are good ads — ads that provide important messages or help people live healthier lives. And there are the bad ads — which provide you with bad advice. Easy to spot, albeit not always easy to ignore.

And then there are the deeply misleading ads. Ads that ostensibly are for good purposes but are deeply misleading. A good example is a recent Verizon ad. Christina H. Summers examines this ad nicely ( Verizon’s Inspire Her Mind ad and the facts they didn’t tell you ) — and shows that “powerful” does not mean truthful, or even good. Especially when you consider the topic of education and science.

Also a great reminder to do the smart thing: Check the facts.

Highly recommended.

A comment for those seeking to use this site for personal gain: Given the increase in requests, let me be clear. I write on this blog because I want to. It’s my hobby, my playground. Sometimes people point me to interesting products/services and I write about them. But any request regarding ads or sponsored placements ends up the trash without a reply. And if you think something would be of interest, differentiate yourself from the spammers by referring to a posting — in an intelligent way. (I get enough auto-generated mails to identify them immediately.)

BTW, posts can get updated after I published them if I spot spelling errors (not a native speaker) or think a different wording might improve precision and clarity.

This blog is not focused on a single topic, or method. As long as it is relevant to improving creativity (or allowing it in the first place), it's fair game.
Some postings on this blog deal with freedom, as I think that we need freedom of thought, of speech, of association, etc. pp. to solve mankind's problems. Thus, some postings may seem a bit remote when it comes to organizing creativity. Freedom is, however, the bedrock of creativity.
The heterogeneity of the postings can make reading this blog a bit cumbersome, at least if you are only interested in one topic. You can either use the search function (above), or use the categories or the tags to narrow down the postings you see.

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects.

A powerful ad is easy, a good one isn’t