This One Weird Trick That Everyone Hates

All right, advertising copy-editors. Listen up. This is important.

Look, I know times are tight. I know you're only pushing out these crappy little one-line scraps of advertising copy because you need the money, and I know it's so little money that it's not worth putting any thought into it. Crank 'em out, get paid, and maybe you can make rent this month. I get that.

But this business of recycling the same advertising hooks for every new job that comes along? It's getting out of hand.

Everything is now "one weird trick". Doesn't matter what's it for. Could be something to lower your insurance costs, increase your muscle mass, help you learn a new language, get you through that writing project, or magically cause you to lose weight. Whatever it is, whatever it does, whatever the hell you want us to click on, it's "one weird trick." Have you even looked at your topic, to see if it's genuinely weird, or even nominally a trick? No, of course not. You're just grinding 'em out, one disposable headline after another.

That would be bad enough by itself, but you can't stop there, can you? No. Whatever it is, somebody hates it. If it helps you learn a foreign language, then professors hate it. If it helps you build muscle, personal trainers hate it. If it makes your computer run faster, computer manufacturers hate it. (Really? They have a compelling dislike for something that makes their products work better? Have you even noticed that that doesn't make any gerbil-buggering sense? No, of course you haven't. Grinding out those taglines, over and over...) I swear, you're not even writing any more. It's just a product-specific version of Mad Libs.

So here it is, ladies and gentlemen of the advertising world: your wake-up call. This thing you're doing, using one-sentence fill-in-the-blank templates to advertise products? It's turned on you. It's become that one weird trick... that everybody hates.