Open Letter to Ad Copy Writers

By Ron R. Clark

The holiday shopping season is upon us like winter itself with its companion advertising as the weather: cold, blanketing, oppressive, and always, always blowing.

As I settle in to end my December days with a little mindless televised entertainment, I find myself bludgeoned with perpetual advertising for myriad products, many leaning heavily and lazily like a 285-pound road-worker on the same tired premise-shovel: (1) Multi-gendered, multi-aged group (quite often assumed to be a family) banter with respect to needing and/or acquiring product; (2) early-to-middle-aged husbandly/patriarchal figure suggests terrible alternative which lays bare his grotesque lack of knowledge of current technology/events and/or the other group members around him; (3) rest of group ignores his screaming dullardry and wisely opts for Advertiser’s product or service; (4) adult male shrugs and defensively cries “What?” with clueless deer-in-the-headlights expression and/or rest of group sidles away from him in bitter disgust.

In the interest of full disclosure, I personally fall into the early-to-middle-aged male demographic, as do a significant percentage of my associates and compatriots. The social and professional circles in which I circulate are indeed peppered with instances of middle-aged men suffering from mental flatulence, yet we all still manage to hold down jobs and largely satisfy our obligations to families, employers, and creditors. The numbskull males in these ads, however, are incompetent social retards whose apparent purpose in life is to always be the Dumbest Mother Fucker In The Room so everyone in their lives from the non-threateningly attractive and wise adult female to the snarky-yet-witty eight year old to the ass-licking mongrel mutt feels that much better about themselves by comparison. My reality glares brazenly in contrast with the fantasy realms created ubiquitously by ad copy writers and their actor-whore drones. Either my reality is false or the liars are the people being paid to manufacture nonexistent eye-catching scenarios with the end purpose being separating the general public from its money. I will let you readers draw your own conclusions as to which side stands in the light of Truth.

The family-ad premise described above has been beaten to for fifteen to twenty years running now. I blame it – thus indirectly the copy writers of Madison Avenue – for the continued implosion of traditional family structure. An entire generation of young women has grown up being indoctrinated into the unfuckingbelievable stupidity of middle-aged men for thirty seconds at a time for their entire young adult lives. These young women thus find these DMFITR as highly undesirable and their adult female companions as servile wretches. Once they realized they’ve called members of this abhorrent class of society Mom and Dad all their lives, young ladies recoil in horror and swear never to allow themselves to fall into the same living hell. As time progresses and they see boys become men, the ladies panic knowing the ultimate transformation into DMFITR is inevitable. Thus running low on companionship options, they either become crazy cat ladies, voracious lesbians, or lonely angry blog queens with formidable vibrator arsenals.

Thus in the interest of America’s, nay, Global Society’s future - in the name of institution of Family – I beseech the community of Ad Copy writers to abandon this hackneyed fake-family set-up. Endeavor to pry cash from our wallets using a more challenging scenario. Hey – why not let Mom be the doofus every once in a while? She can’t be THAT smart – she did marry Dad’s dumb ass…