I’ve been in marketing for more than 30 years, and I am absolutely sick of nearly all marketing and advertising. You’d think I have some kind of immunity, but I’m tired of people trying to sell me things.
I’m tired of flyers in my mail. I’m tired of ads on my Kindle. I’m tired of commercials on streaming subscriptions. I’m tired of being expected to pay $30 for a t-shirt with a company’s logo on it, effectively charging me to promote them.
And I’m sick to death of people on LinkedIn who connect with me and immediately start selling me on their product or service.
They don’t even try to get to know me first. They immediately try to close a deal that they haven’t even pitched to me yet. It’s like meeting a blind date for the first time and asking if they want to get married.
And now these corporate leeches are using artificial intelligence to pester thousands of people per day instead of the hundreds they had to pester by hand just a couple of years ago. They’re not even coming by their sales honestly. There’s no challenge in what they’re doing. Where’s the art in trying to steal from people if you’re just going to have AI do it?
Come on, man! You’re already sitting in a job where the only thing you have to do is move your fingers a little bit, and you’ve somehow become lazy about that? Pick up the phone and try lying to someone in person for a change.
"Doctors hate this woman for this simple trick!" scream the ads. "Doctors don’t want you to know this secret vegetable."
If clicking the ads actually leads anywhere — many of them go to websites in the shadowy corners of the internet — they’re mostly lies to begin with; they never actually tell you what that one secret is. They’re about as believable as your cousin’s Facebook rant about the benefits of horse paste, and the only reason doctors don’t want you to know about this thing is that it will probably kill you.
"Doctors hate this one mushroom, which will provide enough nutrients for the rest of your life."
Look, there’s nothing doctors don’t want us to know about, except why they charge so much.
"Doctors hate this woman for her one weird trick to overhaul the insurance industry."
I promise you, there’s nothing doctors are keeping from us. There’s no one they hate for revealing this one secret. They’re not firebombing the Weird Trick Woman’s house because she threatens to ruin the whole industry. And they certainly do not care about secret vegetables. If anything, they want us to eat more vegetables.
Misleading news articles often do the same thing, writing click-baity headlines to trick you into clicking and having a bunch of ads shoved down your throat. Their only aim is to force you to click through to their article in search of that one piece of information they’ve hidden deep in the bowels of that news article.
"This Fan-Favorite Ride at Disney Shuts Down!!"
Then, when you click the story, they don’t give you the information at the beginning, like a proper news article, written by a real journalist, is supposed to do.
Instead, it starts out with the history of Disney, the history of theme parks, and why people from all over the world travel to them in the first place. Then, more than halfway through the so-called "article," you discover the story is only about how technical issues forced the Dumbo ride to shut down for a few hours at Disneyland Hong Kong.
The headline was written to deceive; the article was written to serve ads. It served no useful purpose otherwise.
"News readers hate this writer for their deceitful trick."
Maybe Dan Brown should write a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Robert Langdon is hot on the trail of a woman who has threatened to reveal her one weird vegetable that could put the entire medical profession out of business.
The weird vegetable has only been whispered about on the internet, a fanciful myth that everyone has seen, but no one actually believes it exists. Also, the Vatican’s nutritionist is keeping it a secret and has created a secret cabal of other nutritionists to hide the truth.
Robert Langdon teams up with French police cryptographer Sophie Neveu once more to track down this mystical vegetable that is only found deep in the remote jungles of South-West-East Amerafrasia.
After several car chases and gun battles, Robert and Sophie discover the secret vegetable — which only looks like a potato — and they try to make the world aware of this life-saving vegetable through the only way they know how: through clickbait advertisements at the bottom of cheap websites.
This book sounds like a best-seller. Except his publisher doesn’t want you to see it.
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.