Thinker-Uppers

Some time ago, I wrote a piece about my 4-year old’s attention span, and how it applies to advertising: Four Year Old Wisdom.
This time, it’s about his perspective.

Jackson is a smart kid. I’m sure all dads say that about their sons. I know it’s true, though. Yesterday, he was talking about the stuff he does in pre-school, and how he makes up games for himself, and for his friends to play. His focus was on explaining the details of various Calvin-Ball kinds of games, when my wife asked him if the other kids made up games, too. He said, “No, mommy – I’m pretty much the Thinker-Upper.”

We talked about being a Thinker-Upper. How the world needs good Thinker-Uppers. How everything – from his favorite toy, to the car we drive, to his favorite websites, and the commercials on his favorite programs, is thought up by Thinker-Uppers. He thought that was pretty cool.

Then I started thinking. About how scrambled the communications, entertainment – and therefore, marketing – landscape has become. About how agencies are flying in a thousand different directions to find the perfect way to get their clients messages to ever-increasingly disinterested prospects. About how none of the old formulas work like they used to. And how new formulas are invented every day – to work for awhile, then be supplanted, or oversaturated, and eventually dropped.

It seems to me that agencies everywhere are struggling to define themselves as something that sounds really impressive in the midst of all this mess. Integrated strategists, or techno-pioneers, or post-modern design-centric boutiques, or grassroots blogvertisers, or any number of other descriptions that basically center on one formula or another. When, really, what an agency should be is much simpler, yet at the same time, much more complex:

We need to be good Thinker-Uppers.

tags: Advertising Marketing