Point of View: Don't be cool for cool's sake

Jon Steel

Jon Steel employs his monthly Admap column to entreat marketers to set the right objectives, then take responsibility for defining and navigating the best route to achieving them.

Don't be cool for cool's sake

Jon Steel

Don't be cool for cool's sake

Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can.

I've always liked that joke, although as I write this column it has a certain irony. Freddie, our Shetland Sheepdog puppy, lying very uncomfortably in the corner of my office, has just been neutered. So now, even if he wants to, he can't. But the original joke still holds some relevance to the point I want to make in this, my final column for Admap.

In 1963, J. Walter Thompson advertising veteran James Webb Young wrote,...

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