A crisis of clicks.

I belong to a few groups on LinkedIn and one of them is the Advertising Copywriters group. There are over 231,000 members. I have 70 connections within that group. Recently, there have been a few members who have taken it upon themselves to claim some level of expertise and share their closely held secrets with the rest of us.

One gent claimed that a headline in the form of a question is an innovative and worthwhile approach. He also claimed that using the phrase “one weird trick” was a good way to generate results. Another contributor posted this deep insight: focus on the needs of the customer. (Funny, I thought this was a given?) Another said that the headline “Back Pain?” was a great way to attract people to a sports massage clinic.

This does not bode well, people.

When practioners who claim to be experts start pushing these kinds of tactics as worthwhile or insightful, I fear for the future of our craft. These are the kinds of ideas we used to discard with self-loathing for even writing them on a peice of paper in the first place. A waste of pigmented xylene and dead trees.

“I am such an effing hack,” we would mutter while we ball up the drek and toss it in the general direction of the waste bin, before going back to search for something more elusive and creative and undiscovered.

Thing is, this celebration of mediocrity is just a symptom. The disease is due to two risk factors: One, marketing professionals have fallen in love the cheap, simple, measurable click more than the hard-to-measure love of brand and lifestyle. Two, good creative thinking is only taught in a few select schools these days and it is generally not coached within agencies. Newly hired juniors are usually expected to swim without the floaties of a mentor letting them know what their ideas truly smell like. Few have the budgets, or the time, to help young creatives expand their grasp and learn to fly anymore.

This, is, of course, good news for those of us who know what we are doing. There are fewer and fewer among us every day who ply their craft with actualy craftiness. Less competition, more good gigs.

But it is bad news for our industry. Without the agency creative guild structure that we once knew, young creatives have to turn to what is going on in the marketplace to see what is “working.” But the dirty little secret is that in a world where a clickthrough rate of less than one half of one percent (0.47 is average for Facebook) is considered a triumph, we all quickly learn to be over-the-moon happy with failing 99% of the time. We think that sending out 1,000 emails to get one warm lead is okay. And we believe we can discern fierce brand loyalty when a consumer moved her finger six centimeters.

We used to think that the old days of not knowing which half of our ad budget was wasteful was troublesome. Today, we pour a 50-gallon drum of expectations into a funnel to get a few drops of concentrated success and we call it money well spent.

We can’t clickbait our way out of this crisis, my friends. It’s time to start putting more trust in the hands of artists and creators and less with UX and data analysts.

Grant Sanders is the founder of SAND and is the host of The Clienting Podcast, a guide for clients who want to get the most out of their relationship with creative firms and make the work better.