royal of advertising

Royal we
Oh, yeah. Perhaps you've noticed that I always referred to myself as "AdReview" or "the AdReview staff" and employed the "editorial we" -- also known as the "royal we" -- to lend an air of pomposity, arrogance and self-regard. "AdReview" was a windbag. My inspiration was the great alt-weekly columnist Cecil Adams (n�e Ed Zotti), who understood the best way not to be dismissed as an obnoxious know-it-all is to be a caricature of the obnoxious know-it-all. My AdReview persona was seldom me; it was usually 120% of me -- a fact apparently lost on many, many readers. Still, I maintained the artifice for 25 years, owing in part to habit, stubbornness and the personal satisfaction of an extended conceptual joke. AdReview is a bit of a dick, but he's 20% dickier than I am.

My other journalistic inspiration was Walter Kerr, the late, great lead drama critic of The New York Times. Kerr understood that caustic wit was crucial in maintaining his own audience, but not paramount. What is paramount is being an honest broker of your own judgments, and never succumbing to the temptation of skewing negative for the sake of a cheap punchline. If you wish to see what happens when this principle is ignored, spend five minutes reading the ad blogs or Gawker. They are intermittently amusing, deliberately mean and ethically bankrupt.

Intellectual honesty also means never pandering to the tastes or expectations of the audience. At Cannes, especially, where there is so much appreciation for gratuitous novelty, shattered taboos and post-modern irony (i.e., the standards that so often put agencies so structurally at odds with the interests of their clients), it's easy amid the chummy and boozy atmosphere for an on-location critic to go native. But if a Gold Lion winner is really a golden calf, someone has to speak up. This can make for quite the buzz-kill on the Carlton terrace.

DOVE: The 'Evolution' campaign got high marks.

On the other hand, one of the myths surrounding AdReview over the years is that I don't like anything, I dump on everything, I have not a kind word to say about anything. Recently, for instance, some online commenter named Pete wrote, "Bob Garfield is an idiot. He's a glass-half-empty douche-bag." Not true. If anything, I am a glass-half-full douche-bag. Over the years, the average AdReview star rating has been approximately 2.6 stars on a scale of zero to four -- which falls somewhere between "mediocre" and "good." Surely a random sample of 1,200 ads from this time period would not generate anywhere near that high an average. This reflects my endless quest to honor great work with the praise and recognition it deserves. Not easy. In fact, far from stacking the deck in an un-Walter Kerr way to be meanly funny, I've stacked the deck so as not to inflict, week after week, a merciless drubbing.

Not that I claim to be especially sensitive to the feelings of the creative community (although, by policy, in a negative review I don't name individual names). It's just that a weekly pan parade would quickly have been dismissed as juvenile and irrelevant -- just as a hit parade would have been dismissed as Pollyanna and irrelevant.