With news that Congress’s “supercommittee“, the group of Representatives and Senators who have been tasked with cutting the federal government’s deficit and debt, has met for the first time, it made me wonder about the wisdom of committees and the adage that a platypus is an animal built by committee.
That train of thought took me to a ceditra entry from over ten years ago. Back on May 21, 2001, my process for randomly creating a topic to write about (which was never dreamt up by a committee) took me to page 12 of the Money section of USA Today where I landed on…
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[An advertisement for Aether Fusion showing the results of six people painting the Mona Lisa.]
Well, if it’s Monday and time for a ceditra and I have had USA Today chosen for me, then I must be faced with an ad.
My first thought about this advertisement centers on the Mona Lisa because it’s also where my finger fell upon. The use of this painting is to imply the high end of a scale of sophistication. This painting, by Leonardo da Vinci, is seen as one of the best painting, if not the best painting, in the world. I have always been curious about that sentiment since, to my classically untrained eye, there is nothing spectacular about this portrait.
Oh sure, there’s the smile. Countless art scholars have commented on the smile but there has to be more to it than that. Can the epitome of all painting really be based on an enigmatic smile? There must be something else to this portrait that I am missing that gives such prominence to La Joconde. Or could it be that Mona Lisa is nothing spectacular but only through the years of praise heaped upon it has it gained in status. Therefore, since all believe it is a good painting, even thought no one can say why, it is, ergo, a good painting. Because if one tried to seriously analyze the painting and critique it, one would risk going against years of accepted art orthodoxy. We certainly can’t have people going against orthodoxy now, can we?
So given that the Mona Lisa is the apex of all things of a painted nature, why is it in this ad? Besides being free of charge to use since the copyright has long since expired, it serves as one end of the taste spectrum. The other end, the low end, of the taste spectrum is filled by the image of the dogs playing poker. Similar to my rant about how Da Vinci’s painting is perceived to be all that is just and wise in painting, who are the people that have decided that card-playing canines is the ultimate in bad taste?
Whoever that committee is, let us proceed with the premise that the Mona Lisa and the bulldogs are the yin and yang of the visual arts. The combining of these two images degrades the splendor of da Vinci through guilt by association. The juxtaposition result answers the question of the ad “What if it took six painters to create the Mona Lisa?”
The underlying premise of the question and the ad harks back to the Aesop moral, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. Having too many people work on or create something denigrates the value of the final product. Aether is banking on the fact that people reading the ad absorb that message when they read the copy of the advertisement. This ad is for a product called Aether Fusion. Like most current technology ads, this one doesn’t go into great detail about what the product actually does. It seems to revolve around making various wireless technologies (device, networks, protocols) work under a common infrastructure.
Now to tie these two threads together. Having multiple wireless technologies at your company degrades your product as surely as six painters diminished the glory of the Mona Lisa. By using Aether Fusion, your product will become like Leonardo’s masterpiece.
What does the name Aether mean anyway? Much like the current trend of not identifying a product’s feature, there is a trend towards using names for products and companies that make no sense. That, I’m sure, has a purpose, but I can’t see it.
I’ll bet good money that it took six (or more) people to develop the name Aether.
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Back to 2011 and if six painters could so mess up the Mona Lisa, I will be curious to see what double that number does to the federal budget process.
Form Your Troika 