What A Useless Education Taught Me About Advertising
About change, compliance & the problem with perfect systems
17 years ago I was sitting at an exam table, sweating like a pig facing the barbeque.
I was in college, minoring in “Digital Communication & Aesthetics” — knowing full and well that anything we learned would be outdated by the time we graduated.
That alone should make anyone sweat.
Furthermore, I was trying to convince two professors that everything they knew about the internet was about to change.
In 2005, a new phenomenon had only recently hit Denmark:
Myspace.
Remember that? Top 8 Friends, some guy named Tom, and a completely linear feed with no algorithm to please or piss off?
On this strange, unprofitable platform I had spent most of the semester building an online presence for my underground indie band instead of studying — and had become a full-on believer in Web 2.0 and what would eventually become social media.
Unfortunately, my professors didn’t feel the same.
They saw no potential in the new media and one of them called it a “gimmicky message board”.
I passed the exam — but was furious they didn’t recognize the revolution on the horizon.
A few months later, Rupert Murdoch bought out Tom Anderson.
The following year, Facebook opened to the world.
Now I wonder if I can get my grade changed retroactively?
The Real Problem With Education
There’s a systemic problem in education that rewards static thinking.
Where you are taught to memorize boring things and sit still for longer than you want to.
Where good students learn to game the system and parrot the teacher.
And bad students are punished for thinking creatively.
Case in point: If I had been a good student, I would have picked a less controversial topic than social media turned out to be.
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
At worst, a long education makes you a docile expert in systems optimized and finely tuned for the world that is instead of the world to come.
Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin puts it cut and dried:
School is supposed to teach you leadership and interesting problem-solving.
Instead, you are taught compliance and how to use secondhand logic to solve problems to which you already have the answer. Or the teacher does. Probably.
The educational system is at its core designed to turn you into a literate but compliant piece in an industrial-era puzzle that doesn’t exist anymore.
It wasn’t made for a digital age where the structures of human communication change every other year or so.
It’s good for factory work, military discipline, and manual data storage (old-timey scholars and librarians) because you learn to operate in a box best not challenged.
But it’s terrible for any creative endeavor where you have to think outside of the box.
The human brain evolved to predict the future.
To constantly recognize surrounding signals as either friendly or dangerous with the speed of instinctive reaction.
Much later we got reason to explain the past.
As a species of social apes we didn’t develop reason to make better decisions tomorrow… but to justify the bad we made today.
When an archaic school system forces our best and brightest brains into systems of static logic, we stifle their ability to predict — and change — the future.
It’s probably why the college dropout has become such a desirable archetype in Silicon Valley.
Because too much education — or at least specialization — creates devotees of old rather than inventors of anything new.
Back To School
While I was roasting at my oral exam back in 2005, the term “social media” had not even been coined.
Still, you might expect two professors in digital media to recognize the tidal wave of change around the corner.
I certainly did.
But I probably underestimated how much Web 2.0 challenged the old internet in which the two were experts.
If you’ve spent your career getting really good at one thing, you don’t want to hear that “the thing” is about to explode.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
Tim Lee-Bernes thought that pictures on the web were ridiculous.
Both the inventor of the internet and my two professors had enough systemic bias to make them blind to significant change.
Because it would make their old work less relevant and new work more uncertain.
The more you rely on fixed structures and static knowledge, the more vulnerable you become to disruption.
Because you’re blinded by self-preservation. A challenge to your livelihood is hard to see as a solution to anything. Easier to pretend it’s not there.
It’s how Blockbuster missed out on buying Netflix for next to nothing.
And it’s why I failed at making my two professors believe in social media.
There was obvious evidence but no carefully compiled data to suggest a revolution.
“Specialization is for insects.”
If you build your life on the past, you risk missing the future.
And yes, I know, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, blah, blah, blah.
Which is probably true.
But if you rely on yesterday’s data and static knowledge of temporary systems, you’re doomed to be forgotten with them.
Learn from history. Then unlearn.
Great Writing
While I minored in something that would soon be outdated, I majored in something that already was… Comparative Literature.
Here I learned the same, slightly depressing lesson:
That interpretive systems were more important than the human expressions they were supposed to explain.
I enrolled believing I was going to read deep, intellectual theories to better understand great writing.
Instead, I learned to selectively exploit great writing to defend the deep, intellectual theories.
It didn’t matter if my thesis ruined James Joyce’s Ulysses for anyone who read the paper — as long as I proved that Jacques Lacan’s psycho-babble was right!
The map had become the territory. And the tools and systems we relied upon were more important than the human communication underneath.
It’s the same reason why SEO agencies will shove keyword density and power phrases down your throat with the grace of an industrial robot — but somehow never come up with a meaningful message.
Because systems are easy and human expressions are hard.
The result is measurable but soulless.
Teacher Talk & Human Speak
Long before college, as an insecure child, I got validation from speaking the grown-ups’ language.
To be fair, I was a somewhat curious kid but I think it goes for a lot of people:
Education has an inherently Pavlovian problem that rewards you for writing up to the teacher instead of speaking straight to your peers.
If you were ever a young nerd with good grades but only a few friends, you know what I’m talking about.
Once you’re out in real life, you learn to dumb it down real fast — or you venture further into the tribe, attend university, and go work in a highly specialized field where everyone thinks and speaks like you.
I’ve heard more than a few advertising executives ask why graduates of English or Literature don’t write brilliantly straight from university.
So I’ll tell you:
It’s because university makes you a sh*tty writer.
At least it did for me.
Sure, it gave me a decent understanding of narrative structure, rhetorical tools, and how the greatest writers used the craft.
But that is just called reading!
What I really learned was to turn a 10-page idea into a 30-page paper by adding superfluous intellectualisms and academic jargon.
Because your job as a student is to prove that you’re smart enough to belong in the tribe and know its language.
Once you leave and join the workforce, it’s a rude awakening to realize you should have learned the opposite:
To turn your 10-page idea into a 2-page pitch, a 30-second script, and a single perfect line to capture the magic of it all.
Persuasion: What They Don’t Teach You At College
College doesn’t teach you persuasion because the subject itself holds implied importance.
Economics, Anthropology, Classic Literature… Same fundamental problem:
The shared belief that it matters way too much.
In my final year of uni, someone wrote their thesis about dog narrators.
About stories where the narrator was a f**king dog.
And we all pretended like it mattered.
It’s the implied importance that creates an academic tribal language far from reality and the people who live there.
As a student, you learn to write to a professor who is literally paid to read your words. And as a professor, you write to students who are forced to.
You learn to distrust anything entertaining because it is not “scientific”.
Dreaming up persuasive copy to consumers who don’t give two sh*ts about Shakespeare or Chaucer is simply not your problem.
Spend the flower of your youth doing that and it’ll take a lot of unlearning to become a halfway decent writer.
In fact, it’s been 17 years and I’m still working on it.
The Lesson For Advertising & Everyone
Once organizations get to a certain size, they run the risk of becoming like my old professors.
They optimize for a world that is, where their systems fit perfectly. And they fail at adapting for the world to come.
They’re left open to disruption as everything solid melts into air.
Industry leaders gain their position because they get a good idea at the right time and build efficient systems around it.
But the more they build on top of those systems instead of the idea itself, the more vulnerable they become.
And once they go all in on “best practice”, they start the countdown towards someone else inventing a better practice.
“The problem is nobody ever explains to clients why the obvious is bad. They think it must be right because everyone in their market is doing it.”
Meanwhile, many mid-tier players act like good students who know how to parrot smarter people with different words. Because it’s how they’ve learned to succeed.
They fall to the psychological fallacy that there is just one correct answer — and the perceived leader probably has it.
It’s the reason why too many brands end up as pale imitations of industry juggernauts instead of challenging the status quo.
Because so much of life is learned conformity.
Those who don’t unlearn will continuously try to fit in — and as a result, will never stand out.
Both brands and agencies have plenty of clever students who studied something very reasonable at business school.
“Strategic Marketing With Focus on Cross-Cultural Relationships With China”. Or something to that effect.
Smart people who know how to work and game a system.
But if you succeed by playing the game, you’re unlikely to become a game-changer.
Or, like my old professors, even notice the change.
It’s why we need more Outsiders in Advertising.
Advertising missed out on Myspace and was relatively late to the so-me party because the industry systems were built for the old world.
At the threshold of Web 3.0, we fall to the same reductive and simplistic solutions.
We use the same recruitment tools and hire the same kinds of people from the same schools, expecting unique work while spiraling towards the same predictable results.
We need more slackers with useless educations, more wild ones with weird paths in life, more dropouts, dreamers, and underachievers.
We need more rebels who aren’t paralyzed by perfect systems but instinctively understand their limitations.
That’s all for today’s lesson.
Thank you for reading this long-winded lecture.
Now go have recess and unlearn something.
