I love ads. I rank them by creative virtuosity like an art critic. When I hear music, I envision 30-second movies with settings like Delta’s runway and Nike’s cityscape. They flash across my screen and I understand how the late Roger Ebert must have felt watching Casablanca for the first time. 

The golden age of Apple’s advertising dynasty came with Robin William’s 30-second Apple commercial. It’s modern life captured in refrains, the essence of the human soul translated for whatever Taylor Swift tickles and the Beatles drove crazy. “Who are we?” Apple asks metaphorically. They answer with pictures: The dreamer, the intrepid creator, the love-child of rock stars and Spanish dancers.

Ads are about sensory experiences – pulsing, drumming in our brains as we walk down the grocery store aisles. This was the apex. While the iPhone bug was sweeping the world, the advertising bug was making me sick. I realized that Apple was not just selling phones; they were selling storytelling itself. Delta wasn’t selling plane tickets; they were selling adventure. Writing that can do that deserves a place alongside the novel, the poem, and the play.

American businesses are sellers of equal parts goods and services and impetuous human desperation. Their writers persuade with the knowledge of a demographic and the ability to adhere to its sensibility.

What is it about this particular brand of poetry that made me want to write copy all of a sudden? Did this commercial – does art give us an idyllic view of an abundant and storied world? Is it the beauty itself? No, we aren’t all this shallow. It is the admiration for the craft, the savoir-faire, the savvy for saxophones and the cadence of clauses but – it’s not. No, it is their reaching into that window to that darker untapped part of ourselves wherein lie our inner dreams and ambitions, the unrealized, idealizing wild thing, seduced by either desire or delusion, aching endlessly for the shortcut to rock stars and Spanish dancers…externalized elegantly in edited exposés, ephemeral, enchanting, riveting and fleeting and immortal. Yes.

I know not all commercials are that fantastic. Maybe for a lack of funds, but also for boring copywriters. Is German engineering really the best kind? Probably not, but there’s no time to tell. It’s a matter of efficiency; “Memory believes before knowing remembers,” as Faulkner said. The mind isn’t convinced of anything in 30 seconds, but there’s the heart of it.