For years, decades, I earned my daily bread in the advertising trade, working in advertising agencies. My job was on the creative side, developing strategies that would most effectively lure customers, then turning them into ads in whatever media was required. The goal was always to use ideas and words and pictures and music to arouse interest and keep viewers or readers or listeners watching or reading or listening long enough to absorb whatever message we wished to convey. We always believed the audience deserved some level of respect in exchange for our intrusion into their lives.
But most
people in the advertising business, like most people in most businesses, do not
care all that much. They don't care if the advertising is creative or entertaining or inventive
or unexpected. They are just putting in the time, putting their emphasis on
looking and sounding good in the endless supply of meetings, both within the
agency and with clients. They do not want to rock the boat; “give the clients what they want,” is the force that motivates them.
And that is why most advertising falls somewhere between invisible and inane.
That is
why some guy in a tie somewhere decided that holding a “sale” is no longer good
enough. That the public is no longer interested in discounted prices. That
calling a sale a “sales event” would excite the audience (for whom they have
little respect) into showing up in frenzied droves and parting with their
money. After all, isn’t the very idea of an “event” exciting? Wouldn’t it
deserve three—no, four—exclamation points in social media?
While this
earth-shattering development has little effect on audiences, it somehow resonates
with advertisers. So it’s, so long to a “sale,” and hello to a “sales event.”
Car companies, in particular, have made adding “event” to a “sale” mandatory,
it seems. And “sales event” has disseminated, propagated, and circulated until
it is ubiquitous.
Most
people probably don’t even notice it, just as they don’t notice most of the
dumbed-down, simple-minded advertising messages that interrupt every aspect of
their lives. But no one, I daresay, is so excited, so electrified, so
hypnotized by a “sales event” as opposed to a mere “sale” that they rush right
out and gleefully part with their money.
I could be
wrong. I haven’t been in a client meeting in years. But one thing’s for sure—somebody
is stupid when it comes to “sales events.” It could be me.
