I saw an ad for a Chevy truck last night. It had all the requisite touch points: the deep base male voice-over, the truck driving up an impossible mountain, a female passenger adoring the ride, and by association, her driver. What caught my attention was the line “… equipped [...]
In the late 1950s, Phillip Morris & Co. hired Leo Burnett Advertising to change the image of their feminine filtered cigarettes to make them more masculine. Filtered cigarettes were a technical ruse. They were supposed to be healthier and were mostly smoked by women. Burnett launched one of history’s [...]
… And We Better Figure It Out Fast As liberals, progressives and climate activists we are busy analyzing and dissecting the new (poorly named) “Inflation Reduction Act” climate bill. Does it contain too many giveaways to fossil fuel companies? Is it enough? How much will it lower our carbon [...]
“We can no longer tolerate Republican’s bankrupt delay on climate.” Do you get an image or feeling on the quality of their delay from this sentence? If we want our ideas to spread, we must use words that create images and feelings and connect them to stories and narratives [...]
“Now, what is a pollutant? A pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for [...]
“We may not know what lies ahead, but it’s only human to search for it.” – Chevron This is the concluding sentence from a recent Chevron ad I saw. Seems innocuous. It’s lofty and inspirational and would likely slip past, except it raised my “cow waste” detector. Not many [...]
I was in the great Southwest in April. I drove north up 84 toward Las Vegas, New Mexico glad to finally have a 40 mph tailwind. Halfway there, I ran into a tumbleweed storm. Hundreds of dusty rolling aliens flying across the road like some herd of strange frightened [...]
Let’s say we wake up and find out that Jackalope are going extinct because they are being eaten by Bigfoot. After all, they are a favorite delicacy of Bigfoot. What do we do? We probably start a Save the Jackalope campaign... of course. We have to make people aware [...]
There are no magic words. Words that you can say that will make people suddenly understand and then prevent our rapidly unfolding climate chaos. Some words are better than others, but lots of them are just junk. Of course there is more to the climate crisis than words. But [...]
