"The Great Idea in advertising is far more than the sum of the recognition scores, the ratings and all the other superficial indicators of its success; it is in the realm of myth, to which measurements cannot apply"
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Bogart is taking a swing at the industrys favorite self-soothing ritual: pretending that numbers can certify meaning. Recognition scores and ratings, he implies, are the advertising equivalents of taking a patients pulse and declaring youve captured their inner life. Useful signals, sure, but also temptations: they let agencies and clients outsource judgment to dashboards, and they reward what is easily recalled over what is deeply felt.
The phrase "The Great Idea" is doing quiet, old-school work here. Its not just a clever concept; its the rare campaign that behaves like culture, slipping into shared memory with the stickiness of folklore. By calling that realm "myth", Bogart isnt romanticizing advertising so much as acknowledging its real ambition: not to inform but to enchant, to create a story people volunteer to carry around. Myth is collective, irrational, hard to attribute, and almost impossible to A/B test. Thats why it scares measurement-obsessed institutions.
The subtext is a warning about what gets killed when you worship metrics. If success is defined by "superficial indicators", then the safest path is toward bland, optimized sameness: work engineered to spike short-term recall, not to alter how a brand is felt over years. Bogart is also defending a particular kind of authority - the human kind. Taste, intuition, and cultural fluency look unscientific next to a chart, yet theyre often the only tools capable of detecting whether an idea is becoming legend or just getting clicks.
The phrase "The Great Idea" is doing quiet, old-school work here. Its not just a clever concept; its the rare campaign that behaves like culture, slipping into shared memory with the stickiness of folklore. By calling that realm "myth", Bogart isnt romanticizing advertising so much as acknowledging its real ambition: not to inform but to enchant, to create a story people volunteer to carry around. Myth is collective, irrational, hard to attribute, and almost impossible to A/B test. Thats why it scares measurement-obsessed institutions.
The subtext is a warning about what gets killed when you worship metrics. If success is defined by "superficial indicators", then the safest path is toward bland, optimized sameness: work engineered to spike short-term recall, not to alter how a brand is felt over years. Bogart is also defending a particular kind of authority - the human kind. Taste, intuition, and cultural fluency look unscientific next to a chart, yet theyre often the only tools capable of detecting whether an idea is becoming legend or just getting clicks.
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| Topic | Marketing |
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