Brands, Empty Connections, and the Search for Authenticity
It happened again. Another brand, another misstep. Apple’s new iPad ad literally smashes creative tools, while OpenAI’s voice AI launch references a misanthropic dystopian re-enactment of the film Her. Even Deadpool, known for his irreverent humor, gets too meta by seeming to diss on itself in a way that feels too scripted.
Dear Brands: Here’s the thing about people: we crave depth. We want honesty. We want agency. Are you so focused on staying ahead of the curve that you’re losing sight of what really matters? Or have you simply lost touch with us?
I don’t have all the answers, but I keep coming back to my poetic roots for guidance. Decades ago, I fell in love with the work of William Carlos Williams and his philosophy of “no ideas but in things.” It was the simplicity and concreteness of his imagery—the red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater, the plums in the icebox—that struck a chord with me.
And then there was Allen Ginsberg, another poet who understood the power of grounding his ideas in the tangible and the real. According to Ginsberg:
“But the thing that always stands permanently in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty which sets a value upon all works of art, and makes them a necessity.”
For Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, it was about more than just poetry. It was about stripping away the artifice and the pretense and getting down to the essence of what it means to be human—raw and deeply felt, is the Dharma bum; again, Ginsberg:
“who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,”
Maybe we all just need to “Howl.” Be the red wheelbarrow, the plum in the icebox, the cry that transcends our own superficialities, leaving no void, only a sense of shared humanity and purpose.
