I can feel it coming...

If you were to sit me in a room with a pen and pad and ask me to describe the difference between sales and marketing, there's a good chance you'd come back 15 minutes later and I would've written an essay about the hot ghost peppers I'm growing in my garden and how they burn at both ends.

That's how bad I am at businesses-ease. 

I don't speak it. Mostly because even after 35 plus years in the corporate world I don't understand it.

But I do understand communication. And how messages are received by the people we spend so much time courting. Similarly, I know that just because a proposition or pitch message is clear doesn't make it effective, or persuasive, and certainly not disruptive.

Sadly however, we live in an age of truncated attention spans, data driven data, and a complete misunderstanding about how the business to consumer messaging model works.

I see it every day and I hear about twice a day from my handcuffed copywriting colleagues who have been reduced to keyboard monkeys. Copying what's written on the brief and pasting it directly onto the ad, banner, tweet, or whatever mishigas messaging unit that befalls their fate from the Big Wheel of No Cost Media, that day.

This goes a long way to explaining another phenomena.

Every week, we the art directors/copywriters/creative directors get together for a chit chat. We call it a brand pod. In essence, it's a video conference call that sadly attempts to recreate the camaraderie once found in the now deserted hallways of America's corporations.

And every week someone poses the question, "Did anybody see any advertising efforts worth talking about?"

Followed by 15 seconds of awkward silence. 

And not because we were all on Mute.

It's hard to talk about breakthrough advertising out there when there appears to be so little of it. We did  agree that the Credit Karma spot about the couple needing a bigger yard was done quite well. You can't miss it, it features a little girl on a swing who keeps hitting the fence because the current yard is way too small.

Is there a point to any of this? 

Not anymore than there was point to Cadbury running this ad.

Maybe that is the point. 

Here's my completely anecdotal best practices tip of the day: For advertising to work, it has to be unlike other advertising that's out there and not working.