Everyday we lose skills that have taken years to develop and hone. We read about how hunters and gatherers can live in the woods without any outside technology helping them survive. They have learned which plants to eat, which animals to hunt and how to make their own shelter from available materials.

The average modern urbanite would be unable to survive in the woods, unable to know what to do, unable to navigate home without a GPS system.

But people in remote areas do it all the time. Think of the skills that may have taken millennia to learn and can disappear in a generation or two. Much like languages are disappearing world-wide these skills will not be replaceable as humanity bets on constant progress and dependency on technology.  Even technology gets lost, such as the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer that confounded its discoverers with its complexity.

In advertising over the past years since we went digital, there are no longer mechanical artists, optical benches, dye transfer retouching, font suppliers, tape editors who can cut and splice, printing plate makers, or even “lucy” machines that we used to adjust layouts.

Here is a list of some skills that I have noticed that have recently become extinct:

• Faxing – So far this week, I have been asked to sign and send four forms. The fax back number on the form didn’t work 50% of the time. Anyway, no one seems to know how to use the fax anymore. There were few who mastered this technology to the black belt level – being able to do more than just put in the number to send to and hit send. Now no one even knows how to do that. So what’s the deal – does that little machine make a pdf?
• Map Folding – It almost took a master in origami to fold the map back up and many never mastered this obsolete skill, especially my wife. The map doesn’t talk to you while you are driving, like my wife or the GPS system. Why do we even have these collections of maps?
• Letters – No one sends written letters any more. People can hardly write using a pen. And licking a stamp is definitely a lost skill since they are all self-adhesive. Which corner of the envelope does the stamp go on?
• Playing records – Those large black CDs have a huge hole in them and won’t fit in my computer. What do I do with them?
• Making Change – If the person at the cash register doesn’t enter the amount you have given, they have no idea how to give you change from your purchase. Try this anarchistic test: buy something for say, $21.26 and wait for it to be rung in. Then give the cashier a $20 bill, a five, a quarter and penny.  If they had assumed $25 would be paid, they will not know how to calculate your change.  Guaranteed! They have been trained to give what the cash register tells them and can no longer think.
• Making Popcorn on a stove top – Doesn’t the stove top heat burn the bag if you try this?
• Using a rotary phone – How does this work? Where are the buttons to push? How do you text with this thing? I heard you pick up the phone that is on the string and ask for someone by name. And why is it attached to the wall?
• Understanding an analog clock – Why is it round. What are those sticks turning around for. Why doesn’t it just tell the time?
• Stick Shift – Do drivers, outside of sports car afficionados and long haul truckers, still have the ability to shift gears manually?
• Knowing Stuff in General – Why bother, Google it.  And if you need more details, look in Wikipedia.

Send me your list. I am sure there are more than these.

One of the funny things about working in advertising as long as I have is that you constantly run into people who tell you about great advertising they have seen.  More than half the time they cannot, for the life of them, tell you what the product is.

While they are entertained by what they have seen, it isn’t good advertising.  Advertising’s goal is to convince you to buy into a product, service or idea.  If you can’t remember what it was, it fails as effective advertising.

These folks are just voyeurs of advertising.  They are constantly exposed to it and therefore consider themselves to be somewhat experts.  Proximity does not create expertise.

Each year, I find my patience with advertising voyeurs is waning more and more.  They seem to think that advertising is some kind of entertainment.  It ain’t.  If it entertains, fine, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of achieving its objective.

Inside the industry we have a different kind of uninformed.  These are the poseurs, who, by strength of personality, charisma, or politics, are in a position of authority or decision making in the communications industry.

These people think they understand advertising by reading the industry press – which it like learning colour appreciation from the blind.

A poseur, says the dictionary, is “a person who habitually pretends to be something he is not.”  A lot of people pretend to be experts in advertising.  I once had an interview with a person who had been an agency president who claimed that his way of determining great advertising was “I’ll know it when I see it!”  I immediately thought this guy was full of… well a political player with no technical knowledge of advertising.  Well, with international

Without criteria for assessment, it is a personality or authority test more than one of assessing ideas.  A poseur.

Years ago I was working on a brand in New York.  The client had cancelled all advertising until the agency could come up with a great idea.  The agency was striking out.  Three campaigns went for quantitative testing.  Two were abject failures, the third barely squeaked into being nearly average.  It was below average, but not enough below to be eliminated.

We had been off the air for nine months and decided to give this advertising a chance while we continued to come up with the “great idea.”  Besides, the advertising featured minority talent and there was concern that the public would not be inspired by it.

The advertising went on and sales immediately went up 25% on a long established packaged good.  “Must be the promotion” said the client.  Must be.

We decided to do some quick focus groups in Atlanta to get feedback on the advertising and find out if something was happening.  We started our focus group with participants speaking about the category and then focused in on the advertising.  The moderator showed one of our commercials.  The lights came back on and she was about to ask for discussion on the commercial.  One participant raised her hand and asked “can we see the commercial again?”

“Of course” said the moderator.  And then, with continued requests, showed the commercial five or six times.  The participants smiling, chuckling, and feeling better and better each time.

Behind the one-way mirror, I knew we had found gold in the advertising.  A commercial that had almost not made it to air because of weak quantitative scores.  A commercial that we did not recognize as a great idea.

Yet it was a campaign that brand used successfully for more than 25 years.  It was a campaign that became more important than the brand because it allowed line extensions and ended up embracing the client’s category line not just the one brand.

The campaign I am talking about is the Jell-O Pudding advertising featuring Bill Cosby.  One that textbooks quote as a great marriage of personality with brand.  But it took the market place to prove it worked, not the experts, including me, in the meeting rooms.

So when some poseur tells me “I’ll know it when I see it,” I know they know nothing.  The market knows.  We can only put together the best elements.

I have been involved with other advertising that became notoriously effective and was still memorable twenty years after the fact.  The Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” and Subway’s bad penny, Jared.  No one saw them coming either.  We weren’t all stupid.  But the truth is the market knows more than the experts, real or poseurs.

The fact is: Great advertising has to pass a sniff test of being clear, provocative and persuasive.  It takes years to put those pieces in a nice package.  People outside the industry have no clue how advertising works.  And many in the industry, who can pontificate on their innate ability to know good advertising when they see it, don’t really know either.  They don’t know where the beef is.

I am not old enough to have experienced the environment shown on Mad Men, but I worked on Madison Avenue in the 1970s and had quite a lot of interesting experiences.

The smoking and drinking on the TV show put me off, but they reminded me of one funny situation that I encountered while working in the headquarters of one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

There was a particular area in the corner of one Creative floor, the eighth, where people would hang out and smoke.  Smoking was pretty universal.  Although I never smoked, my guess would be that more than half the people working in the agency business smoked.

But the smoking I am talking about here was not tobacco.  And this smoking was pretty broadly accepted in the industry too.  However, when the big bosses came down to the eighth floor the roaches were quickly tossed behind the radiators.  Time and time again.

Over the whole summer this would happen quite a few times, maybe once or twice a week.  But it never seemed to bother anyone, neither the smokers or the management who must have smelled it in the air.

The problem occurred the first cold day of the fall.  That was the day the radiators were turned on.  The result was a regional high.  No smoke, just a resinous haze coming from all those roaches.

Not sure much got accomplished that day.  But everyone felt good and was hungry for some snacks.

Advertising always seems to bring the hope out in marketers and clients.  They set goals for their advertising to achieve and then hope, hope, hope that those goals are achieved.

Hope equates to risk.  And advertising should always be about risk.  Advertising is about sticking your neck out to see if everyone notices you.  If they don’t notice it is not going to be effective advertising.

This counters most of our instincts about sticking out in a crowd.  Human behavior is mostly directed at “fitting in” with the rest of the crowd.  Who wants to wear a Hawaiian shirt and shorts to a formal dinner?  We shudder at teh social faux pas.  So we worry about social risks.

With advertising the conflict is about clients’ desire not to be too risky and at the same time making sure the advertising is intrusive and provocative.

Number one priority is making sure the argument is clearly presented for the viewer to understand.  If it isn’t advertisers are relying on pure hope – no logic.

Advertising can err on losing the clarity of the message by being so provocative that the message gets overwhelmed and missed.  Careful balancing act between hope and the real message.

Experienced creators of advertising programs realize and draw on their thousands of hours of experience and hundreds of commercial messages created to deliver this balance.

Psychologists reckon that one requires ten thousand hours to really be proficient at a complex skill like creating advertising.  The delicate balance of attention and consolidating the strategy of the advertising proves that it is true.  No one falls out of bed with this fully developed skill.

If that is so, why does the advertising industry crave – even go out of our way – to use inexperienced people to do our creative work?  Is it based on that same hope?

I guess we believe that popular culture, of which advertising is a paid member in good standing, is renewed from the 20somethings who are the biggest users of music and video entertainment (that includes movies).  But is that a valid assumption?

You certainly don’t have to be a product user to know how to sell a product.  You have to be a master of the craft in putting together the message that provokes and appeals to the user.

Personally, I have worked on feminine hygiene products (biology won’t let me use them) and many other products and never used them.  I have worked in a few languages I didn’t speak ro write.  These things don’t matter so much as long as the argument in the strategy and the message are well crafted.

Based on that I would say that experience will trump hope when creating an effective message.  Give me the master craftsman over the excited apprentice any day.