Decade

Goodly is 10 years old.

What began as a meager stab at search engine optimization a decade ago has become a vocation—you might say, a compulsion—of mine.

With nearly 400 thousand readers, Goodly no longer serves as a device for driving website traffic, but as a way of shouting, Hey, I'm still here.

I recently launched Blog, a new venture that's going to consume my time if it's to succeed—as, I hope, it will.

Meanwhile, God willing, Goodly will continue, pandemic or no, recession or no, civil war or no, global warming or no. 

I'm still here.

Gasbagging

The fewer the words, the truer the words.

— Robert Brault

Logorrhea, the gasbag's debility, eventually becomes our affliction as well.

That's because, through his torrent of words, the gasbag seeks to divert us from the inconvenient truth.

We often hear, in regard to politicians, talk about gaslighting; we hear much less about gasbagging.

Gasbagging—bloviating to distract and cover up—has become the weapon of choice for many politicos, especially ones on the right. Personally speaking, I can't stomach the tactic. I associate it with bullies and con men.

George Orwell warned against gasbagging in his essay Politics and the English Language. 

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell said. 

When confronted by an inconvenient truth, the insincere gasbag—then deny they're "playing politics" when that's precisely what they're doing.

"In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics,’" Orwell says. "All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."

"The fewer the words, the better the prayer," Martin Luther said. I like that formula.

So, let us pray: 

Lord, make them SHUT UP.

Amen.

Surface Notation

An artist is making something exist by observing it.

― William S. Burroughs

The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.

He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."

[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]

Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.

I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."

It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.

The good news? 

Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.

Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."

Promise to watch over myself. 

That's about the best I can do.

Painting "Social Distancing" by Robert Francis James

Fake Muse

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

— Winston Churchill

When the going gets tough, the tough post quotes.

Many folks I follow on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are forever posting these pith-packets, proving our appetites for the keenly-said are insatiable.

Ward Farnsworth, dean of the U. of Texas law school, calls quotations "little triumphs of rhetoric."

Quotations can give us solace, change our thinking, and move us to act. 

"Quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts," Churchill said.

But what if a quote is bullshit?

Can it still inspire?

The answer is: yes, it can inspire, at least, some of us. 

In a study of 280 people, behavioral scientists at the University of Regina presented subjects 10 randomly generated "pseudo-profound bullshit statements" (faux quotations attributed to Deepak Chopra, such as, "Imagination is inside exponential space time events”). They asked them to rate each statement's profundity on a scale of 1 to 10. The study concluded that, the more gullible we are—the higher the profundity score we give the fake statements—the higher our "bullshit receptivity.”

Highly gullible people, according to the study, are not only susceptible to bullshit, but are "less reflective, lower in cognitive ability, more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideas, more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine."

You need not be gullible, however, to be taken in by a fake muse. Lots of quotations are counterfeit.

Here are my own 10 randomly generated samples:

"Nuts."

When General Anthony McAuliffe was asked to surrender his command at Bastogne, he purportedly sent that one-word reply to his German counterpart; but in fact he replied, "Bullshit." Newspapers couldn't print a profanity in 1944.

"Follow the money."

Deep Throat never advised Woodward and Bernstein this way. Screenwriter William Goldman invented the quotation for "All the President's Men."

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein never said this. It comes from AA.

“I have just begun to fight.”

Eyewitnesses indeed heard John Paul Jones shouting at the British, "No quarter!" from his perch on the BonHomme Richard. But never this. A writer invented the quotation 50 years after the fight.

"Play it again, Sam."

Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) never uttered these words in the 1942 film "Casablanca." Woody Allen fabricated the line when titling his 1969 play.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day and would never have bad-mouthed the habit. The quotation comes from another psychoanalyst's footnote to a 1950 article he wrote for the journal Psychiatry.

"Let them eat cake."

Jean Jacques Rousseau, not Marie Antoinette, said this. He wrote it in his diary when the future French queen was only 13, single, and living in Austria. Rousseau attributed the line to Maria Theresa of Spain, who a century earlier had been told by her advisors the local peasants had no bread. "If they have no bread, let them eat cake," she replied. But the Jacobins laid the quote on Marie Antoinette at her trial.

“Nice guys finish last.” 

Leo Durocher was asked by a sportswriter what he thought of the 1946 New York Giants. Durocher said, “Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys who'll finish last.” The reporter omitted "who'll."

"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

Vince Lombardi liked to say, "Winning isn't a sometime thing; it's an all-the-time thing," a motto he stole from another football coach, "Red" Sanders. Reporters always tightened the statement.

"The harder he works, the luckier he gets."

Donald Trump never said this—about himself or anyone else. Sam Goldwyn said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get," paraphrasing an adage he saw in Reader's Digest.

So I hope you're inspired to question everything. In the immortal words of Buddha:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

By the way, Buddha never said that.



NOTE: Read a bit more about the faux quotations editors call "quilt quotes."

Downtown

Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.

— Stephen King, from The Stand

A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand. 

On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.

I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).

And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.

My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).

I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.

Changes Ahead

We have it within our deepest powers not only to change ourselves
but to change our culture.

— Gary Snyder

Fifty years ago, San Francisco Beat poet Gary Snyder published Four Changes, a hippy-dippy broadside that fast became environmentalism's manifesto.

Who'd ever have guessed fifty years later that not men, but microbes, would trigger the "total transformation" he envisioned.

Snyder conjured a world blessed with a healthy and diverse global population which is governed not by national leaders but a "world tribal council." A world blessed with a "technology of communication, education, and quiet transportation." A world blessed with societies that inhibit power and greed and encourage instead "music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world." And a world where women are "totally free and equal."

Listen to Gary Snyder read his remarkable statement.

Because there's something in the air.

Hyperbole

“Truthful hyperbole" is a contradiction in terms.

— Tony Schwartz

Spartan. Dangerous. Terrifying. Nightmarish. Horrific.

Too often in recent days, I've heard these words used by journalists to characterize the temporary hospitals that are propagating the country.

Spare me.

Valley Forge was spartan. 

Vietnam was dangerous. 

The Blitz was terrifying. 

Aleppo was nightmarish. 

Auschwitz was horrific.

In fact, the temporary hospitals are havens for the sick. 

And the job our military is doing is nothing short of herculean.

There's a hyperbole you don't hear enough.

Hedging

You can fudge. 

You can waffle. 

But if you're really low-life, you hedge.

The verb hedge, meaning to "screen yourself from a bad choice," comes from the Old English noun haga, meaning "fence."

The Brits stole haga from the German word Hegga. The Germans stole Hegga from the Latin word caulae, meaning "sheepfold."

In Merry Old England, hedge came to mean "shelter," because the homeless—highwaymen, knights and vagabonds—would sleep under hedges.

By the 16th century, hedge was used as a verb meaning to "dodge" or "evade." By the 17th century, it began being used to mean to "bet against loss."

Money-lenders in the time would make an unsecured loan to a borrower only were he willing to roll it into an outstanding loan that was secured.

The lending practice was known as hedging.

Of course, gentlemen never hedged.

That may have prompted Samuel Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, to say hedge "notes something mean, vile, of the lowest class."

Johnson didn't beat around the bush.

Did You Know Dashiell Hammett was Once a Copywriter?

Tuberculosis compelled Dashiell Hammett to quit his job as a Pinkerton detective in 1921.

Seeking less strenuous work, he enrolled in a journalism course at a business school in San Francisco, and began to write mystery stories for pulp magazines.

But by 1926 Hammett found mystery-writing couldn't earn him enough to live on, so he applied for a job as a copywriter with Samuels Jewelers. It paid a whopping $350 a month—nearly 10 times Hammett's earnings for pulp fiction.

He liked the new work; but he liked booze better. Before six months on the job Hammett was fired, after passing out in the office.

At the encouragement of a pulp magazine editor, Hammett began writing a "hard-boiled" mystery novel, Red Harvest. He mailed it—unsolicited—to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1929.

Knopf realized it had received something unprecedented: a thriller that was "real art."

With weeks of the novel's appearance, reviewers were comparing Hammett to Hemingway. 

Hammett followed Red Harvest the same year with a second novel, The Dain Curse; and in 1930 published his most famous detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.

War on Words

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

― George Orwell, 1984

Two decades ago, two child development specialists tracked the weekly growth in the vocabularies of 42 children over 30 months. They discovered a child's socioeconomic status determined her vocabulary's breadth―and her test-scores later in school.

So not only does family of origin determine academic success; words do, too.

So why destroy them?

After a public outcry this week, the head of the CDC denied that President Trump banned the use of seven words by her agency: diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, fetus, science-based, transgender, and vulnerable.

But, as it turns out, new style guidelines imposed by Trump do ban the seven words―and that CDC is by no means the only agency under the thumb of the president's word-police.

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” the German poet Heinrich Heine said. And where they have destroyed words?

But fear not: resistance is facile.

Invent a word every day. 

If you need inspiration, follow Fritinancy, a blog dedicated to new-word formation.

Be like Shakespeare or Dickens or Orwell (who once wrote, "What is wanted is several thousands of gifted but normal people who would give themselves to word-invention as seriously as people now give themselves to Shakespearean research"):

• Shakespeare invented the words articulate, barefaced, baseless and watchdog.
  

• Dickens invented the words coffee-imbibing, messiness, sawbones, and seediness.
  

• Orwell invented the words newspeak, prole, thought-police, and unperson.

My new word for the day?

Automadon.

Ross Macdonald Redux

Both sides of the tracks are the wrong side,
if you live close enough to them.

— Ross Macdonald

That the Coen Brothers plan to turn Ross Macdonald's Black Money into a film is reason to go on. 

Although only one of Macdonald's 18 "California noir" mystery novels, it's a ripper—as are nearly all the books forming the Lew Archer saga, the adventures of an LA detective who's more poet than policeman, more psychoanalyst than private eye.

I rarely let a year pass without rereading one or two of Macdonald's masterpieces. His observations of people trapped by undeserved wealth and poverty are ceaselessly humane—and as accurate as any you'll find in genre fiction.

As in life, no one in a Lew Archer mystery is without sin—neither the oligarchs nor the outcasts; the matriarchs nor the mobsters; the cops nor the con men; the hippies nor the hucksters; the surfers nor the starlets. And the prose is delicious—the key reason Library of America this year enshrined 11 Lew Archer novels in its collection.

"Macdonald matters because he’s one of the finest fiction writers in American literature, not just detective fiction," says biographer Tom Nolan.

Macdonald learned to write in graduate school from teachers like W.H. Auden and Cleanth Brooks, who taught him that not only every word, "but every line, every sentence, every little block is integrated into the whole, and everything should have equal weight to create a unified work of art and beauty," Nolan says.

"The things that are most interesting and appealing about him, and valuable to people still, are the beauty of the expression, of the language, the beauty of the prose, which has poetic qualities and is informed by a great lyric talent."

Banking on Brevity

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and
a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.

― George Burns

New-media company Axios, launched in January by former Politico staffers, intends to distinguish itself among the legions of online newsletters by "writing short."

There's a lesson in this for business bloggers, egged on by experts to blather for SEO's sake.

“Journalists are writing for journalists. That’s the biggest problem in media right now,” says Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei. “People don’t want the pieces we’re writing. They’re too damn long.”

Ad-free for now, Axios will generate revenue eventually through $10,000 subscriptions, the founders hope.

"Smart brevity" is the key to attracting those subscribers. The newsletter's website describes the idea:

If you think about your evolving habits for consuming news and information, you realize you have less time, and a shorter attention span. Our content, our ads and our platforms are designed specifically to adjust to these new habits and demands. We aim to make the experience more substantive and meaningful—and therefore more valuable. When we pull this off, it will free people up to spend time on content truly WORTHY of their time, on our platform or elsewhere.

Axios, you might guess, is Greek for "worthy." By writing short, VandeHei plans to steer clear of the "crap trap"―the dead end publishers turn onto when they forget readers come first.

The Great Rule of Foresight

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling

Most ventures, products and ads fail. Mind-blindness, tone-deafness and overoptimism are the chief reasons why.

Nothing's fail-proof, but you can look positively clairvoyant—especially when no one's sure which direction to take—by presenting lots of ideas.

When asked, for example, to name a new product, create a campaign, or write a major headline, I strive to present clients at least 10 ideas.

I try not to fall in love with any one, but to think of all as straws in the wind.

"Throw straws in the air to test the wind," said the 17th century Jesuit Baltasar Gracian.

"By finding out how things will be perceived—especially from those whose reception or success is doubtful—you can determine a great deal about their chances of turning out well, and decide whether you should proceed in earnest or withdraw entirely.

"By trying people’s intentions in this way, the wise person knows on what ground he stands. This is the great rule of foresight in asking, in desiring, and in ruling."

Iconicity

Names should be as much like things as possible.

— Socrates

Corporate logos and road signs often demonstrate iconicity. But words?

A new study suggests they do.

While linguists like Noam Chomsky insist any link between a word and its meaning is a man-made convention, two research scientists, Nora Turoman and Susy Styles, say the link may be a natural occurrence.

That link may be iconic. An iconic word would be one whose form resembles its meaning.

Turoman and Styles found that ordinary speakers, when presented with pairs of ancient glyphs, can correctly guess which letter was used to represent the sound "oo" (as in "shoe") and which was used to represent the sound "ee" (as in "feet").

Their experiments further suggest some glyphs better represent the sound "oo," and some better represent "ee"—regardless of where or when they originated.

The glyphs that represent "oo" are more likely to be complex (i.e., use more ink); the ones that represent "ee," more likely to be simple (i.e., use less ink). The "guess-ability" of a glyph is higher for those that use more ink to represent "oo" and less ink to represent "ee."

But what's the link to nature?

Turoman and Styles claim it's acoustics.

The sounds "oo" and "ee" differ in their acoustic frequencies (we pronounce "oo" at a lower frequency than "ee"). So "oo" fits with big, inky glyphs for the same reason low-frequency sounds are produced by big bells; and "ee" fits with less small, less inky glyphs, for the same reason high-frequency sounds are produced by small bells.

The Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

― Charles Bukowski

A Freudian psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, dreamed up the term "writer's block" in the late 1940s. His remedy, naturally, was the "talking cure." At today's prices, that costs $300 a session.

Fine, if you can afford it.

A fiction writer like Stephen King cures writer's block less expensively.

King simply goes for a three-mile stroll, and conjures up another unhinged politico, demonic pet, or zombie retiree, to move a gridlocked story forward.

B2B writers can't use that trick (although walking is good for everyone).

You'll find lots of nutty advice (climb into a sleeping bag, or listen to pink noise, or down a martini), but the best cure for writer's block, in my experience, is a three-step technique I learned from copywriter Bob Bly:

• Locate a project you wrote that's similar to the current project
• Make a copy of the file and open it
• Start rewriting your own copy

You'll not only avoid writer's block, you'll quick-start the new project. Don't have a similar project? Then swipe another writer's and start to rewrite that.

Try it. Don't wait til writer's block besets you.

Picky

"It turns out that copy really matters," a CEO recently confessed on LinkedIn.

Until he was forced by circumstance to roll up his sleeves and execute, Adam Schoenfeld had been only strategy-minded.

"I didn't get it before," Schoenfeld says. "Now I've come to believe that the best marketing teams nail the details. They get the big picture for sure. But their magic is in the details!"

Duh.

Why don't more executives realize execution matters? Particularly in copywriting.

The late, great marketer Herschell Gordon Lewis said, "The picking of nits is what copywriting that sells is all about."

Lewis was right, of course: nit-picking's the activity distinguishing copy that sells from copy that fails.

To wit, the following example.

The copywriter here indeed fails—big time. Perhaps he's too self-absorbed to "walk in prospects' shoes" (in this case, members of the military). Or maybe he's green. Or maybe he's just lazy, content to copy and paste from an internal brief. In any event, he isn't picky.

Association Members are entitled to specially negotiated Group Discounts not available to the general public. We continue to leverage the vast purchasing power of hundreds of thousands of Association Members to negotiate exclusive Group Discounts. You’ll save big on select Apple and Dell computers, hotel stays, car rentals, active-lifestyle apparel, outdoor products, and more. Association Members also save with FREE access to “concierge-style” travel services.

What's wrong with this copy?

Association Members are entitled...

"Entitled" is a politically-loaded word, particularly among right-leaning folks. (How many members of the military do you know who lean left?)

Members receive would remove the connotation.

...to specially negotiated Group Discounts...

"Specially negotiated" is redundant. "Group Discounts" is shop talk.

Members receive savings not available to the general public would work better.

We continue to leverage the vast purchasing power of hundreds of thousands of Association Members...

More shop talk, plus a self-centered standpoint—and an awfully vague claim.

More than 370,000 members take advantage of these savings every year would work better.

You’ll save big on select Apple and Dell computers, hotel stays, car rentals, active-lifestyle apparel, outdoor products, and more...

Even more shop talk, plus erratic name-dropping. Consumers don't know what "hotel stays," "active-lifestyle apparel," or "outdoor products" are. And why aren't brands named for any of those product categories, as they are for computers? Are those offerings crap?

You’ll save big on computers, hotel rooms, rental cars, clothing, outdoor and sports goods, and more... would work better.

    

Association Members also save with FREE access to “concierge-style” travel services...

Shop talk. And what does "concierge-style" mean, anyway?

Members can also use our free travel service would work better.

Now, our perhaps-lazy copywriter would string together the revised sentences and call it quits.

Members receive savings not available to the general public. More than 370,000 of them take advantage of these savings every year. Members save big on computers, hotel rooms, rental cars, clothing, outdoor and sports goods, and more. Members can also use our free travel service.

But why settle for pedestrian copy? Why not tighten it and—more importantly—put to work the indisputable power of the word "you?"

Membership lets you take full advantage of deep, member-only discounts on purchases of things like clothing, computers, outdoor and sports goods, hotel rooms, rental cars, and more. You also get to use our concierge service to plan trips. It’s like having your own personal travel agent.

Stay picky, my friend. Execution matters.

Did You Know Rachel Carson was Once a Copywriter?

Armed with a bachelors in English and a masters in biology, Rachel Carson landed a temp job in 1935 at the US Bureau of Fisheries, where she earned $19.25 a week writing scripts for a 52-week radio series, Romance under the Waters.

Her boss, Elmer Higgins, and his all-male staff called her scripts "seven-minute fish tales."

But a year later, Higgins promoted Carson to junior biologist, one of only two women in full-time professional jobs at the Bureau in 1936; within 10 years, she became editor-in-chief of all agency publications.

Carson, however, wasn't content only to shill for the government.

Through books and magazine articles published on the side, Carson also gained a large public following. Her 1952 book, The Sea Around Us, stayed on The New York Times' best-seller list for 81 weeks, cementing her reputation for making scientific research vivid.

Her 1962 book, Silent Spring, became a classic.

Hoodwinked

On the comeback trail, disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker hawks high-priced “survival buckets," each one filled with freeze-dried nibblies guaranteed to come in handy at the Rapture.

You have to wonder where Bakker―who fleeces his flock of shut-ins for millions annually―got his gift for hoodwinking.

To hoodwink means, of course, to pull the wool over someone's eyes. But the word comes from falconry, not shepherdry.

To calm a falcon―with eyesight 10 times sharper than a human's―until it reaches the hunting spot, a falconer covers the bird's head with a leather hood.

In a word, the hunter hoodwinks the falcon.

The term is redundant: both of its roots mean to blindfold.

In the 16th century, hood meant to scarf; wink meant to close both eyes.

A 1610 translation of St. Augustine’s City of God included the sentence, "Let not the faithless therefore hoodwink themselves in the knowledge of nature."

Hoodwink came into popular use thanks not to St. Augustine's translator, but to an amateur falconer named William Shakespeare, who used the word over 50 times in his plays.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Ann Ramsey for inspiring this post. Falconry has given us many common words and expressions, including under my thumb and wrapped around my little finger―expressions Jim Bakker no doubt uses daily.

10 Years a Blogger

Chris Brogan's advice—to make blogging the bedrock of your social media outreach—spurred me to start blogging 10 years ago.

In those years, I have learned to:

• Post early (8 am) and often (cadence counts).
  
  
• Niche.
  
  
• Write short. (If you value readers, don't smother them.)
  
  
• Be honest, and never surprised your most popular posts are the most heartfelt.
  
  
• Think "Progress, not perfection," but edit five times.
  
  
• Stay open for inspiration (and realize most sources are off line).
  
  
• Accept that you're not Mark Twain, Seth Godin, the Dalai Lama, or even Vito Corleone.
  
• Outpost.
  
  
• Remember Mama said there'll be days like this.
  
  
• Don't try to explain why you blog to your family.
  
  
• Get used to silence.

Admit You're a Hack

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative,
original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

— David Ogilvy

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, wants you to believe storytelling is hack work.

"I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device," he says. "But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner. Content marketing is a job, not an art form."

I suspect Baer doesn't know that Faulkner, with over a dozen dependents to support, wasn't above sports writing, travel writing, and movie scriptwriting (he's credited for, among other films, The Big Sleep).

But I get Baer's point: marketing's kind of storytelling ain't art-making; it's hack work.

"I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective," Baer says, "thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not.

"The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. Content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise."

Or, as my agency's website says, "“It’s not creative unless it sells."