Hyperbole in Advertising: The Honest Lie and How to Tell One

“In The Confidence Man, Melville’s showing off his showmanship, letting you know he’s bluffing. And that’s the only way you know to trust him.”

– Zac Friedman, “Prose and Cons: On Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man’”

 

It’s hard to market without an active imagination. The industry’s technobabble may fool you into thinking marketing is a wholly scientific process: It’s just a matter of plugging your product’s specs into the “buyer’s persona” formula and testing the resulting ads, no?

The Ogilvy Conundrum: Should Your Copy Be “Creative”?

David Ogilvy, founder of ad firm Ogilvy & Mather, is often considered the godfather of modern copywriting. His Ogilvy on Advertising and Confessions of an Advertising Man are standard reads for budding copywriters. And Ogilvy is a man after my own “Hemingway heart,” having once written the following:

Three Inspiring Hawaiian Sites for Writers

That the pristine beauty of the Hawai‘ian Islands has made them prime tourist destinations for vacationers across the globe should be no surprise to anyone. But less known is just how much the islands’ aesthetic has affected our most esteemed writers and driven their work.

Striking Hemingway: Vision in Writing and Viral Marketing

I came across a quotation of Ford Madox Ford’s that illuminates Hemingway’s talent and I want to share it here: “Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tessellation, each in order beside the other.”

5 Things P. T. Barnum Can Teach You About Inbound Marketing

From the Duke and the King in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to the shifty stranger who sneaks aboard the steamboat Fidèle in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, tricksters and charlatans of all sorts have long pitched their tents in and helped define American culture. They’ve ranged from the good and kindly to the wicked and cruel. But no one has better realized the type than showman and impresario P. T. Barnum, the onetime purveyor of Barnum’s American Museum and part-founder of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The Iceberg Theory

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” 
– Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Ah, Hemingway! If his signature Death in the Afternoon (the cocktail) was a bold, bubbly blend of absinthe and Champagne, then his Death in the Afternoon (the guide to bullfighting) was the most effervescent fusion of writings technical and creative we’ve yet seen.