Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night but I woke up cranky this morning. Just to see this.

Screen shot 2011-08-31 at 12.26.06 PM

Screenshot from TNW (The Next Web) (Who buys these placements? Who creates these lames display ads that nobody sees?)

The conference season will begin in September again. It will be filled with ROI-producing case studies, self-congratulating panels, creative and media awards, and insightful keynotes. Since you can’t attend every conference, you can read about all of that on smart blogs, follow the tweets or just read the trades. While the industry showcases brilliance during these events, the sad truth is that the vast majority of what we put in front of customers is utter garbage.

It’s annoying, patronizing, mind-numbingly boring, mind-polluting, insulting, lazy, plagiarized, irrelevant or just plain stupid.

Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything else

The majority of movies made are garbage.

Can you image how bad the screenplays are that were never made?

Most of the books written are garbage.

There’s even a name for this: Sturgeon’s Law/Sturgeon’s Revelation.

Theodore Sturgeon didn’t mention advertising but when you consider advertising an art form, you shouldn’t be surprised about the results customers encounter each and every day.

Producing garbage takes about as much time/efforts as producing good stuff

As a buyer, you have to develop a media plan, get client approval, negotiate, traffic, upload and optimize your placements.

As a creative, you need to develop concepts, get internal then client approval, produce the ad and adjust the creative.

All those hours, all those internal/client discussions, all the spread sheets and Powerpoint slides, all that thinking, all the client meetings and phone calls. All those sleepless nights, the people you never met, family time you never had, all those books you never read, blog posts you never wrote and things you never learned. For this garbage?

I believe we have choice: We can say no to garbage

We have no choice when we sacrifice our time to create work.

But we have a choice when it comes to quality.

Let’s create something that’s worth talking.

And, let’s say ‘No’ to garbage.

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