Buried in the Crypt (Part 2).

come.

And no, that solitary word isn’t a typo, proofing error, or design malfeasance. Instead, it’s a total rip of a clever attention device pioneered by Howard Gossage, a.k.a., brilliant progenitor of the left coast’s version of the 1960’s advertising creative revolution.

Ask any Gossage stan and you’ll hear he was the moral and philosophical equivalent of Bill Bernbach—admittedly on a more regional scale and without the same impact on the factory side of the business. Still, the shit he came up with is legend, and the loneliest orphan in typesetting history, see above, is a celebration.

His notion: if the best of advertising is a dialogue between advertiser and audience, why not make ads that reflect how people really talk? Pursuing, he somehow managed to persuade a client to a) take out a series of ads in the New Yorker magazine and b) to allow him to end some in the middle of a sentence, inspiring captivated readers to peruse next week’s screed in order to find out how the story turns out.

You’re probably thinking that would never fly today since everyone knows, right down to our bloody nubs, that nobody reads nothing (editor’s note—except the entire damned internet). To which I’d counter that we’ve merely institutionalized Gossage’s conversational pauses and rebranded them as “clicks” or “next steps.” Where we fail to honor his genius, altogether sad, is our failure to recapture his graceful conversational leaps; the exquisite use of humanity-elevating language that bridges the narrative gap.

True, that’s all a very long-winded way to return to last week’s post on the troublesome vagaries of crypto marketing, the one that ended with the fragment, “More on this to”. But the reason the indulgence seems fair is this: Gossage would have been familiar with a debate around the permissible limits of advertising that capitalizes on exploitable human traits, greed and gullibility included.

In fact, with the WWII “big lie” propaganda still very much in his rear view, and the then-flourishing trend of agencies adapting psychological principles to mass promotion, he’d most likely have thought, it’s fucking déjà vu. 

He would have been right, and maybe on steroids. After all, while a wide variety of the era’s famous mad persons engaged in vigorous dissent about the ethical limits of persuasion, they were talking about actual products, not blockchain-based financial constructs that, arguably, could be defined as something between a consensus opinion, promissory note, and pulp fiction.

This is the land of murk, and shades of gray abound—especially in the face of a $1T loss that literally wiped a community of “greater fools” off the financial map. You look back at this year’s Super Bowl and have to wonder: was Matt Damon saying ,“fortune favors the brave” okay, because it kinda-sorta clearly said “reward starts with risk?” If it was, how about Larry David’s 100% FOMO-based pitch with its litany of opportunities you, and he, missed? And then there’s Coinbase, with the internet crashing QR code spot who just doubled down on the promise.

It gets worse. Yesterday’s New York Times recounts the noxious tale of pro-wrestler-turned-influencer Logan Paul who pimped a failed crypto coin without disclosing his biasing interest. And the hosts of other coinpushers, from Kardashian to LeBron to Foxx and Witherspoon to innocents who “woke up one day to find they had a million followers,” cashing on a marketing environment that’s entirely missing guardrails.

The ghost of Crypto Bowls past could be the bellwether of Ponzi schemes to come. Or not. Quite possibly those guys in Davos “remembering” the guy who used then-low value cryptocoin to buy a pizza—an amount now equal to $400,000—are right and the stuff of dreams, in fantasy, will turn out to be the stuff of dreams in reality. Again, or not.

Not to namecheck, but the terrifically creative Bob Brihn recounts hearing Creative Hall of Famer Tom McElligott espousing, “no ad is going to get you to jump out of your chair and into your car to go buy a product. But what it can do is make you aware of the product so that the next time you’re in a position to buy it, you will.”

That’s undeniably true, and the contemporary term is “mental availability.” But what if we know, to the point of certainty, that it’s too easy for someone who might be famous, or even just popular on the internet, to get hundreds or thousands of people to invest in a speculative financial instrument called “bit-_____.”

What are the limits,

then?