EARNEST WORDS
from Ernest Nicastro
Opinions, musings, thoughts, ideas and the occasional rant…on life, language, marketing, advertising and what's going on in the world.
from Ernest Nicastro
No Comment“Eighty-seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….The Gettysburg Address
Thankfully, Abraham Lincoln was not only a great leader, he was a great writer. So instead of beginning his Gettysburg Address with a cold, lifeless number, he opens on a prayerful note with a turn of phrase adapted from the 90th Psalm of the King James Bible: “Four score and seven.”
Clearly, Lincoln knew the difference between the almost right word – and, the RIGHT word. A distinction defined by Mark Twain some 25 years later as…”the …
Recently, and strictly for research purposes mind you, I googled the word “sex.”
My search returned 3,900,000,000 results. Next, I searched the word “quality” and got 5,800,000,000 hits. Based on these results one might make a case that we have a greater interest in quality than sex. While I believe this would be a seriously flawed hypothesis, it’s well established that quality is an important consideration in the buying decisions we make. That’s why every year businesses spend billions playing the “Q-Card.”
A generation ago Ford Motor spent huge advertising dollars …
So I’m at the gym the other morning putting in an hour on my favorite elliptical, the one that’s smack dab in front of the TV. The Today Show is on and they’re doing a segment on retirement planning. The reporter is interviewing a financial expert.
“So,” she asks, “what are the things people need to be honing in on as they approach retirement?”
I grimace and think, “No, that’s not right.”
Then I recalled a conversation from a couple of years ago. I’d emailed my client a draft of the direct mail …
