Jeff,
What a fresh and truthful expression about the advertising world! So much so that it motivated me to write and thank you for sharing this! Integrity, truth and honesty can really move mountains.

Kerry LaCoste
Principal
LaCoste Design, Inc.

Fastball right down the middle, Jeff.

In my career, I've listened to and presented hundreds of ideas for everything from cars to pharmaceuticals to pizza. I wouldn't be surprised if no more than 30 or 40% of those had the capacity to make the cash register ring or move someone to act. It always seemed to me like we were creatives advertising to other creatives instead of touching, moving and inspiring regular people to buy.

There is a truer and more honest morality to the work we do that sometimes gets lost in our zeal to get clients and win awards. I hope universities and agencies will teach that morality to the young creatives entering the business.

I may not know anything about the criteria the Time Magazine jury used in choosing a winner for the competition. But reading Levenson's piece of copy, and judging it on the linguistic level, I am not surprised it won the contest. I attempt below a stylistic analysis of the piece to support my opinion.

Levenson, I don't know his academic background, managed an impressive rhetoric that might confound scholars of Linguistics, Literary Stylistics or Oratory. His use of linguistic concepts and the fluidity with which he weaves these concepts into a cohesive, interpenetrating whole is quite remarkable.

He starts his copy with a Rhetorical Question (RQ): "Is this ad some kind of trick?" Rhetorical Questions typically provide a powerful attention-grabbing effect especially when they comment on taboo issues, such as Levenson's advertising as trickery analogy. His use of the Rhetorical Question gets us to wake up. He therefore scores a good mark for a surprising opening sentence.

Then he goes on to deliver a series of oratorical gimmicks, including the skillful conglomeration of repetitions into a vibrant construct of phonological, syntactic and semantic parallelisms. For instance, in lines 1 and 4, he uses "We" four times. He also uses the same the sentence structure four times as see below:

"We,...,have...;" "...we think;" "...we're wrong;" "we can't...."

The above illustration demonstrates a reduplicative formation of "we" and "w" to create not only euphony to lubricate the reading process, but it also puts an emphasis on and draws attention to our - "we" - as an industry. Levenson here displays a brilliant understanding of the principle of syntactic and phonological parallelism.

In the same example above, he displays knowledge of the Structuralist theory of Foregrounding. By deliberately repeating "we" closely together, each repetition reinforces the other to form an aural and visual picture that draws attention to itself as unusual. In real life, nobody speaks that way mentioning all "Ws". Levenson's style therefore strikes one as atypical; this brings the writing to the foreground of one's attention. This concept of Foregrounding which evolved from Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory of Structuralism has been adapted by Marketing as Top-of-Mind Awareness.

For want of space, I would end my interest in parallelism here - though there is a rich lode of examples throughout the piece - and discuss the other concepts, for example his use of PARADOX.

Levenson employs a contradictory juxtaposition of thought to create ridicule, humour, comedy, and to some extent, satire. Let's look at the following sentence:

"There is indeed a twelve-year old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one."

On face value, the above immediately strikes one as a contradiction. One may wonder how a six-year old would acquire a twelve-year old mentality? On the surface, it sounds absurd. I must admit though that in reality this is a possibility

Another one paradoxical statement is:

"We are a nation of smart people. And most smart people ignore most advertising...."

Is it really true that the nation ignores advertising? What then accounts for the billions of dollars the industry accrues year-on-year? Levenson seems to put these antithetical ideas together to ridicule the 'smartness' tag our profession is so quick to flaunt.

Again, he produces this paradoxical statement, I believe, in an attempt to draw attention, even in the 1960s, to the consumers' collective intelligence; a characteristic that has come to be associated with the swarms of our contemporary socio-digital economy.

Levenson goes on to use even more sophisticated linguistic concepts. His employment of CHIASMUS is classic. Let us examine the following sentence:

"And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people."

If we make "because" a conjunctive mirror-line breaking the two clauses, we realise that Levenson fluidly reverses in the second clause the thought he expresses in the first clause. What is most creative about his style is that he uses the same words to the do the reversal thereby deploying a double rhetoric of phonological parallelism and chiasmus. That is brilliant.

He also displays good knowledge of the principle of SEMANTIC COMPOUNDING. In his linguistic struggle to find the exact words to apprehend his angst, he piles up noun phrases in the final position in the same sentence structure leading to the build up of a compound of meanings. I shall demonstrate this with the sentences below:

"We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises."

The above sentences can be re-written as follows:

"We will die in our marketplace."
"We will die on our shelves."
"We will die in our gleaming packages."
"We will die in our empty promises."

The above clearly demonstrate the writer's anxiety and his attempt to capture an ever-illusive feeling which leads him to use so many noun phrases that ultimately say the same thing. "Market place," "shelves," "gleaming packages" refer to the same idea. They form a compound with the semantic feature: /+luxury/.

Closely related to Semantic Compounding is another concept: NEUTRALIZATION OF SEMANTIC OPPOSITION. I shall demonstrate this principle with the four sentence set up above. It is clear from the above that, Levenson employed the same sentence structure for the four sentences:

We + will + die + preposition + (adjective) + noun.

This sameness of the sentential formula makes all the four sentences equivalent. However, a critical look at the noun compound for the four sentences reveals a semantic tension. "Market place," "shelves," and "packages" have a positive connotation. But they are juxtaposed against "empty promises" which is negative in meaning. This creates a tension.

This friction is resolved by CONTEXTUAL CONDITIONING which ensures all the positive nouns assume the feature of the negative noun. That is, the strong negative influence of "empty promises" conditions "market place," "shelves," and "packages" by the mere fact that they share the same syntactic space. By contextual conditioning the semantic opposition is neutralized.

By this gimmick, Levenson draws attention to the final futility of our efforts as advertising people if we do not up our game.

Putting the positives first and ending on a negative note is also a GRAPHOLOGICAL ENACTMENT of meaning: he uses his writing to dramatize the meaning he is communication.

From my analysis above, it becomes easier to understand why the piece of copy might have been adjudged the winner. It is rich in language and style and must have been written by a Copywriter who knew exactly what he was doing. Kudos, Levenson.

I have attempted to provide a discourse relating to Levenson's style and linguistic competence. I have also tried to justify why he might have won the Time Magazine contest.

My reason for writing this piece is simple: talent is not enough. I am using "talent" in the sense in which we creative people typically understand the word.

As Creative Director of AdSpace DDB Ghana, it is my wish that our creative people would be inspired by the sheer scholarly richness and creative competence of Levenson's copy to strive beyond the ordinary, beyond the creation of communications concepts, beyond technology, beyond all that is rich and famous. and invest in scholarship to empower our brains. As creative people, we should be at the foreground of thought platforms delivering knowledge to the world.

I believe it is a challenge to all of us in Creative Leadership at DDB to inspire our teams to creative and academic excellence.

It is unbelievable how education begets inspiration.