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By Allan Starr
Long before I founded the marketing agency in Phoenix, Shakespeare’s ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ was one of this writer’s favorite sayings.
This is because most of the long-winded dissertations one sees in contemporary advertising and public relations copy make it seem like the perpetrator was being paid by the word, and that clarity or information transference – not to mention persuasion – was not the marketing messenger’s main object.
Marketing in Phoenix is as ‘hip’ and updated a practice as it is most anywhere, which brings me to the subject of Twitter, the unchallenged key word and overriding trend of the moment if not the era. While all the social media have created something of a revolution in marketing communication, nothing symbolizes the brevity aspect of contemporary messaging quite like tweeting.
Yours truly is not one of Twitter’s many vociferous detractors. In fact, the more I learn about it the more convinced I am that it can be a personal – or business-life-changing – tool in the hands of an expert or, at least, one of its more fervent devotees. That said, I sometimes wish that Shakespeare, that literary sage of sages, would have proclaimed, Brevity can also be the soul of nitwit.
One need only take a quick squint at a page or two of tweet posts to understand why so many are so willing to so soon dismiss the medium as rubbish. Indeed, are, numerically speaking, most tweeters certifiable idiots solely bent on the task of being more flippant than others sharing the page? The answer – and I mean this in the kindest possible way – is a resounding yes.
But to allow this to cloud one’s vision so as not to see through this surface clutter to the success stories being written beneath it on a daily basis is to miss the point, possibly the most important point in contemporary communication. Current literature and conferences on the subject, to which I am self-committed on an almost-daily basis, are rife with examples of connections — even fortunes – being made by the more adroit practitioners of the limited-to-140-character-message art.
Yes some advertising in Phoenix is characterized by long-winded copy, but that said, sometimes the story that should be told, simply deserves more than 140 letters of the alphabet and/or symbols and silly abbreviations like lol and omg. Moreover, let’s hope that our marketing messages do not become reduced to content that more resembles the chemical ingredients listed on a food package than a cohesive, impactful story line.
Yes, I realize that only 30 percent of the populace are left brainers who want to read every last word, and I personally neither understand nor create marketing pieces for this factaholic minority. Rather, good marketing communication, with few notable exceptions that I don’t care to credit here, is aimed at the two-thirds of us who can get the drift without the ‘benefit’ of tedious detail.
But sacrificing clear communication on the altar of flippancy will, ultimately speaking, never be an effective way to ‘move the goods,’ whether these are ideas, products or services.
Though a bit long in the tooth, I consider myself a progressive, contemporary strategist and wordsmith who is tuned in to today’s marketplace of ideas and words that inform as they sell. Yet, I cringe in anticipation of being subjected to – or threatened with – an era of marketing communication that comes off more like code than copy.
About the Author: Marketing Partners of Arizona, founded in 1976 by Allan Starr, serves local, regional and national clients with services including strategic marketing, advertising and public relations. A widely-known small-business advocate, Starr is former governor of the Southwest District, American Advertising Federation (AAF), two-term president of The Arizona Small Business Assn. and served six terms on the board of directors of The Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce.
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