Designs

I've been reading Seth Godin's blog as of late, and that man is nothing short of brilliant. I read Purple Cow several years ago at the behest of a guy I know and while it didn't have a lot of impact then, I'm certainly revisiting some of those ideas now that I work at Spanish Fort UMC. With all we're doing with changing the youth and trying to get involved with "church marketing" there's a lot of ideas that he has that make sense in the context of the Church. But that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is me in seventh grade.



I remember a day in seventh grade when I was taking a health class. I don't remember the teacher's name, but I remember it was in a modular building (or a trailer for those of you who like to cut through semantic garbage). At one point during the year, we had to draw a "magazine ad" telling people why they shouldn't smoke. Being a seventh grader that had not yet become the idealistic young man that I am today, I thought this was a great idea. Even though I had no prior advertising experience, I had a killer idea; playing off all of those ads everyone knows that say something to the effect of "such and such number of people can't be wrong!," I drew a simple scene of what looked like a million little grave stones (much like Metallica's Master of Puppets cover art) and on the top I wrote "40 million people CAN be wrong." I thought this was brilliant. I mean, whatever, I just picked a random number, insinuating that 40 million people had died from smoking cigarettes, but the kernel of truth was there. I brought it up to my teacher, beaming with pride, and he told me he didn't get it. He told me to go sit down and do something else, because that didn't "Make sense." And sense he had all the power, I went and sat back down and drew some mundane piece of crap.

The point is, there is no accounting for taste. And I should sue those Truth people, because they stole an idea I had nearly ten years ago. powned