Hello. It’s a bullet.

Not lethal, mind you. Just dodge it if you can.

Bookstore shelves burst with foolproof formulas to increase sales and generate leads, but if one solution really was the silver bullet, shouldn’t the “Business Marketing” section have been reduced to a solitary book by now?

Needless to say, I spend little time reading other marketing gurus’ methods—the “formulists,” at least. Advertising is a bizarre mutant, born from two opposites: art and business. The silver bullet slingers fire their techniques and systems from the business end of the spectrum. My advertising firm, Pete’s Amazing Rectangle Company, sits well toward the other end. Sound strategy is an important starting point, but creating great advertising really is an art.

Now, it’s early in our journey together with Blogtangle™, so I forgive you for thinking, based on that last sentence, that I’m a pretentious twit. Give it time. Hopefully, I’ll disabuse you of that assumption as the posts keep coming at their blistering once-a-month rate.

It’s understandable, too, that business folks would gravitate toward the formulaic when seeking advertising advice. It’s a numbers game on so many fronts: balance sheets, costs, revenue, sales stats, production rates, profits, losses. The bottom line for every business is literally numbers. (Even mine.) Advertising, then, for many, is just another corporate discipline that can be mastered with tools and systems . . . Just plug in the data, Bob, and have a report on my desk in the morning that details how we can make everyone notice us and buy our stuff. Oh, and, put in a few pretty graphs, too.

Good luck, Bob.

Instead, Bob should seek an advertising agency that won’t plug him and his company in to anything. Don’t get shoehorned into a gimmicky system, Bob! (Bob is you, by the way.) Contact Pete’s Amazing Rectangle Company. It won’t take long for me to assess your company and its position in the marketplace. Then, I’ll create completely custom, from-scratch advertising that nails your objectives in a strategically artful way. Artfully strategic? Artegically.

There are hundreds of examples of my past artegic work in my creative advertising portfolio. Check it out. Then contact my ad agency. It’ll give new life to your company…the kind you feel after—oh, I don’t know—having dodged a bullet.