In this part one of two, Garfield provides a new definition of creativity, and says what he really thinks about the Internet and online advertising - the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

Columnist, critic, essayist, pundit, international lecturer and obscure broadcast personality, Bob Garfield has appeared on four continents at venues such as the U.S. Capitol to the United Nations. His high-profile “Ad Review” column in Advertising Age singles out ads for praise or ridicule. He is also co-host of National Public Radio’s weekly magazine program, “On the Media,” and the advertising analyst for ABC News.

He has been a contributing editor for the Washington Post Magazine, Civilization and the op-ed page of USA Today. He has also written for The New York Times, Playboy, Sports Illustrated and many other publications. In his new book, “And Now a Few Words From Me”, Garfield’s unique sense of humor pervades as he lays down the rules for good advertising.

In December, Garfield will be sharing his advertising advice with attendees at the iMedia Summit in Beaver Creek, Colorado. Also, Garfield will team up with Joseph Jaffe to critique “10 of the Best” online advertising creations. (To submit a creative for consideration, email Joseph at jaffe@getthejuice.com.)

Here a few words from Garfield to whet the appetite.

Jaffe: Can you give a sneak preview to your keynote at the upcoming iMedia Summit in Beaver Creek?

Garfield: Yeah, well whether you’re talking about TV advertising or print, or online or posters above the urinal, advertising around the world continues to make the same mistakes again, and again, and again. And at some point, after doing this for going on 20 years, it dawned on me that I keep seeing history repeating itself. So I decided to take it upon myself, in the absence of any actual intervention by God, to promulgate a “10 commandments of advertising.” Just call me Moses.

Jaffe: In your book, you expose the mistakes – often elementary – that are continuously being made by smart people doing stupid tasks in the agency business. So when all is said and done, who’s to blame? The agencies? The clients? The media companies? Ridley Scott for raising the bar so high with 1984? All of the above?

Garfield: I can answer the question with authority. The answer is yes to all of the above. It’s the fault of the agencies and for the values that they exhibit; it’s the fault of clients for falling into the thrall of the agencies, and being impressed by all of the wrong qualities; and mainly a trophy case full of gold-plated – I’m at a loss for a word….

Jaffe: How about the golden calf?

Garfield: … “fetishes” is the word I’m looking for – for the media for being a very poor gatekeeper between offensive or obnoxious content, and the viewer who has not asked to see it; and yes, Ridley Scott and Chiat\Day and Apple, for creating the greatest ad ever, by breaking all the rules, which has encouraged many, many, many lesser talents, over and over again, to also try to break the rules, to advertising’s lasting detriment.

Jaffe: It reminds me of the definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That’s certainly what came to mind when I was reading the first couple of chapters of your book, and you speak about these simple mistakes being made over and again.

When I arrived in the United States from South Africa, I was expecting to witness a plethora of creative genius; after all this is the home of Madison Avenue. Instead, I’ve been appalled by consistent mediocrity and blandness. Why is it that U.S. advertising lags so far behind its global counterparts?

Garfield: I would be happy to answer the question if I thought the premise were correct. My experience is that the United States doesn’t lag behind its global counterparts; it’s approximately in the same place. Unless I’m missing something in the thousands of ads from around the world that I screen in any given year, the mistakes I see here repeatedly are made overseas repeatedly as well.

Certainly the volume of great ads is larger in the United States than probably any other market in the world, mainly because we create so many ads. I don’t think on a percentage basis, the U.S. success is much lower than anywhere else in the world – with the possible exception of the UK, which seems to be more consistently thoughtful.

Jaffe: From what you just said, which is a valid point, it’s not unlike the batting average in baseball; hitting one out of every three balls consistently throughout a career would be enough to get you in the Hall of Fame – or from your perspective, I guess, keeping you out of the Hall of Shame.

Having witnessed the power and potential of technology – and what I mean by that is data, interactivity, content integration, search, all the elements of interactive – in the marketing communications process, I believe that we need to think about a new definition of creativity. I think creativity manifests itself in multiple forms, beyond the constraints of 30-second hyperbole and innuendo.

First of all, do you agree or disagree with me that we need to think of creativity in a slightly different way – and then my follow up questions to that are, how do you think the industry defines and judges creativity today, and how might or should creativity be viewed and evaluated in the future?

Garfield: The answer is a resounding yes. And I’m going to answer this question not necessarily in sequence; more or less all at once, but I think the definition of creativity as understood by most of the so-called creative people in the business is to find funny, impressive, provocative, and basically new ways – more than anything else, new, novel, original ways -- to do a commercial in 30 seconds.

And there’s this cult of both boundary breaking and just originality that may define creativity for the majority of the people, but certainly not for me. Whatever the medium, my definition of creativity has always been looking for ingenious ways to keep the viewers’ attention while solving a communications problem. And along the way, making the consumer more favorably disposed to the brand.

It’s not about who’s the funniest, who can come up with the best jaw-dropping digital effect, or who can come up with the best celebrity; it’s about selling shit to folks. And my definition of creativity, is figuring out, is marshalling your imagination resources to sell shit to folks, without making them go elsewhere with their remote control or whatever.

And one of the reasons I’m so charged up about the Internet is because I believe it’s going to force people in the business to entirely rethink what constitutes creativity. It’s not that I’m not dubious of their ability to discard their old values, and their worst habits, and their worst impulses. I’m not particularly sanguine about that, but I think when they encounter failure using the old paradigm, they’ll understand that a gigantic opportunity awaits if they’ll only start thinking straight.

And just for example, historically, people in advertising have understood the ad to appear approximately in a vacuum. Yes, they’re targeting the ad to reach certain demographics, based on the media choice, but basically, a TV commercial appears on a full screen; a print ad – a print national ad -- typically takes up an entire page, and where it exists, it exists alone. And only outdoor advertising has really been created with the understanding that the message is integrated with some sort of environment. And it offers so many challenges, but also so many opportunities for the clever marketer, and the clever advertising designer, to work with any space that it is sharing with something else; namely, a Web page for example.

And I think that challenge/opportunity alone will distract people from many of their worst impulses and they’ll be able to really use their heads in a way that hitherto they haven’t bothered to, because they’re too busy trying to impress their colleagues in the creative department.

Jaffe: It’s funny because in the past, I’ve taken the Marshall McLuhan statement and tweaked it to say the medium is the metric, when it comes to online. But it seems to me, from what you’ve just said, that in fact, what’s old is new again, and what you’re advocating is very much that the medium is the message. And in this case, what you’re talking about is the power of contextual relevancy, and the ability to talk to the right person in the right place, at the right time.

Garfield: It’s about contextual relevancy, but I’m taking this to one further dimension. If you’re using your data right, not only are you talking to exactly the right person in precisely the right place, at an opportune moment, you’re doing so within a space that this person has chosen. So the risk attached to that is that you’re in his way, because he’s busy on a Web page.

The opportunity is, if you’re respectful of him and are prepared to let him go about his business, you can use that very Web page as part and parcel of your message, in a million ways that I haven’t even begun to think about.

Let me tell you about just two very simple ads I’ve seen that I think illustrate this idea very clearly. One is an ad for Bounty printed paper towels. Whenever the Website Bounty is advertising on appears, the same border of the towel borders the Web page. And then there’s an ad that gives the viewer an opportunity to click through for more information, but the banner itself tells you, by just looking at the Web page – without fundamentally ordering the page or making it a more difficult experience for the consumer -- about Bounty.

And the ad does exactly for the page what the print on the towel does for the towel. It’s a simple idea; it uses this space to communicate the product benefit, in a way that would be absolutely impossible on TV, because the networks aren’t going to let you put a border down either side of the editorial matter. You might get a magazine to let you do it, but it’s obviously a lot more convenient on the Internet.

Here’s another example. It’s for Hanes t-shirts, the kind without the tag inside that makes you scratch. At the top of the Yahoo page is the Yahoo logo in large type, and across the top of the page strolls this rich media character, and he’s walking kind of funny, and he stops, and takes one of the letters, or a piece of one of the letters from the logo, and uses it to scratch his back, and then he replaces it, and keeps walking forward. It does not get in the way of anything you’re doing on that page, but it does draw your attention, and the action itself – which would have been impossible on a TV spot – gets exactly to the problem that the brand is purporting to solve.

There just aren’t a whole lot of media out there that give you the opportunity to do something like that. And needless to say, it’s a very straightforward sales message, that in other media, might not have been told straightforwardly, because they’re too busy trying to create little mini-movies.

These are very good illustrations of what you can do within a medium, within the editorial environment, without compromising the editorial environment.

Jaffe: Who are you and what have you done with the real Bob Garfield?! From talking with you just now, it would seem that we’re doing a pretty good job right now online, and maybe we should be patting ourselves on the back and saying, we’re there; we’re where we need to be from a creative standpoint.

Garfield: No, oh no.

Jaffe: How’s that for an alley-oop?

Garfield: Thanks for that. Now I will take it and dunk it …as online advertising is universally horrible. I can cite 20 or 30 or 100 examples of stuff I think really exploits the unique opportunities offered by the medium, and thousands upon thousands of just disasters. Click-through banners that are never clicked through – why would they be? Who would click them? Rich media that isn’t engaging or intriguing or doesn’t draw you into the message, but simply gets in the way of what you want to be doing; pop-up ads that pop-up not only intrusively, but obtrusively. Music that knocks you out of your chair when it comes up unexpectedly; and trickery -- all kinds of nasty trickery, the worst of which of course are the things that look like Windows dialogue boxes, and when you click on the x to obliterate, you’re actually clicking through to the advertiser’s Web page. The advertrocities so gigantically outnumber the triumphs that I fear for the future.

I’m not too concerned yet about shockvertising and that kind of offense to the user, but I am concerned about just being in my face, when I don’t want you in my face. And as we’ve seen, people hate pop-ups, people hate telemarketers. Well, the telemarketing industry has just been dealt what may be a death blow by the FTC, and we can see that it has pushed too far, and too hard. We saw what Joe Camel did to big tobacco. Don’t let some obnoxious pop-up do that to the online industry, just as it’s in its infancy.

Don’t miss part two, where Garfield will talk about where network television is heading, accountability, TiVo and TV on the Web. He’ll also give his predictions regarding the future of advertising, and one of the more unique responses to the question, “If Jaffe Juice were a drink, what would it be and why?”