First, we got the announcement from mass-meater Steak-umm (and, yes, it is real steak) inviting all of us to drop $49.99 on bedsheets that smell like beef. Funny. But right after that, it was Velveeta quite seriously going where no melting food substance has gone before, pushing cheese-perfumed nail polish, “Pinkies Out.”

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.

Hella lot of bruiting about crypto last weekend (www.protocol.com/bulletins/coinbase-crypto-crash-ad), much of it provoked by a new spot from Coinbase. While the ad attempts a sharp tap on the irony bone, the real twist is this: it ran on TV, a medium whose demise has been reported every six months, mas o menos, since 2001. In the comparative doom-forecasting dead pool, crypto’s hardly been nicked.

Pursuing the theory and practice of reductionism down to its ultimate Occam-inspired expression, The Reductionist has this: New website. Live @ brainchildcreative.com. Done in 1,480 fewer days than it took the guy from Italy to paint the Sistine Chapel.

After too many input from too many sources, with too much bad news and too little headspace to process it all, we somehow wind up with, well, this week. But, hell, it’s only Thursday and who knows what new oddities are yet to be added to a list that’s already veered from the unfathomable to the disturbed. Here’s 5 that immediately trippeth off the mind:

By way of updating Benjamin Disraeli’s slam that there are three kinds of lies—“lies, damned lies, and big data,” I can’t help but share this screen grab from Google Trends. For those who’ve never toyed with this mental crack-equivalent before, it’s a way to analyze and compare the volume of Google searches on a topic, over a period of time, in a geography of interest. Here, I entered “Will Smith slap,” as the first search term (blue line), “Ukraine” as the second (red line), “Joe Biden” as the third (yellow line), last 7 days as the period, and USA-USA-USA! as the playground.

Fans of Dante Alighieri’s epic deadlands romp, The Divine Comedies, are well versed in hell’s 9 circles: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. How the Purgatorio he failed to put brand manifestos on the list is hard to fathom—because, as every writer who’s ever been given the Sisyphean task to come up with one knows, it’s a gig that goes deep south far more easily than anyplace else.

In the spirit of true reductionism, it’s our pleasure to present the launch creative for a dramatic new healthcare product from the good people at FDB in one short sentence.

Just a quick love note: we gave through the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org) but there are dozens of other ways to make a contribution and a difference. As to the rest of what normally passes for a blog post, The Reductionist is too speechless with anger and sadness to put more than a few words on either on paper or into pixels.

On Tuesday, we LinkedIn-published our first collection of what we’ve been calling “fortune cookies”; a running series of small-space self-promotional mini-ads intended to deliver a smidge of “aha,” along with a satisfying crunch.

If you’re in the mood for a slice of wry with plenty of mustard, it would be hard to top this 2021 gem from New York Times op-ed writer, Peter Coy: “One of the approximately 700 things that make climate change a knotty problem is that fighting it requires people living today to do things for the benefit of future generations. And, you know, what have future generations ever done for us?”

The Reductionist is a shade busy hacking through thorn-riddled underbrush to do a full-on post today. But, as a public service, while keeping the flame alive, I can’t resist riffing off a paragraph from a recent Michael Farmer article in Media Village.

While Dickens may have hit the irony in “the best of times” co-habitating with “the worst of times,” everyone knows there’s always the third option: “the times that really suck.” Circa now, anyone parsing the signs, portents, and augurs would have to give long odds that the year in front of us will totally qualify.

Tis’ the cliché, and we know this for two reasons. First, there’s the unrelenting onslaught of seasonal ads that always seem to feature passive-aggressive couples taunting each other with the gift of a monster truck. Who writes this shit, The Reductionist knoweth not. Then there’s the spate of “expert guesses” about the year ahead, penned by talking heads in every category—advertising especially guilty, Well, the hell with all that fakakta schmegegge *. This year, yours truly is going to riposte with the world’s first annual list of “anti-predictions”; actually, let’s call them “predict-me-nots,” since they’re all about what totally won’t happen in 2022. No matter how much they should.

Must be the holidays, because The Reductionist has been finding all sorts of interesting items in his Hanukkah stocking all week long. Okay, they were email flotsam and jetsam, but let’s not split greasy hunks of Santa’s beard over it.

Here’s where the advertising bloviosphere really has got it wrong. The big marketing news about the Facebook rebrand ain’t about some over-before-it-started attempt to change an inevitable narrative.

Recently, we posted one of our LinkedIn “fortune cookie” ads (so called, because they’re designed to impart a smidge of “aha” with a satisfying crunch) that read like so:

Beloved of agency new business ferrets, CMOs, and writers who fancy a shot at something more evocative than another hemorrhoid banner ad, the so-called “brand manifesto” can be the coat of many colors for creatives and marketers alike. In the right hands, they build understanding, ignite emotions, excite colleagues and consumers, and, on utterly rare occasion, become the stuff of advertising legend. 

Call it more evidence of a deepening deficit in critical thinking, or maybe we’ve gotten too freaking frightened about acting on instinct and experience. But increasingly, The Reductionist keeps colliding with circumstances where otherwise perfectly savvy people are willing to buy a prediction, any prediction, as long as it comes packaged as “data-driven.”

This being the Jewish Day of Atonement, it seems only appropriate to start with the confessions right from the top. Including The Reductionist’s secret fantasy about channeling the immortal Frank Costanza and rebranding the whole thing as “the day of evening scores and setting records straight.” In that spirit, and while I pause to ponder the probability of a lightning bolt arriving from on high in the next few seconds, I did want to share a few, well, call them rueful reflections on a few of my more or less egregious errors of judgement in 5780/81 (if you happen to follow the Hebrew calendar).