The Brett Story:

Near as I can tell, a lot of Christians have an aversion to advertising because it promotes materialistic products they don’t need. I get that. I’ve heard several compelling sermons from leading pastors on the topic of idol worship in our culture and how it undermines the gospel.

In his book, Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller makes a convincing argument that if we all followed the first two commandments, the rest of them would be unnecessary. I.e., if we didn’t idolize that flatscreen TV in the window, we wouldn’t need to steal it. The same logic applies to our neighbor’s wife and pretty much every other sin. So naturally, if we view advertising as merely a tool of an overcommercialized culture, hell-bent on bilking every last one of us out of every last penny and turning our eyes from Jesus and towards the new iPhone, then it’s understandable why folks in the pews view David Ogilvy as the antichrist.

But wait. What if, rather than tool of Satan, advertising in and of itself was viewed as neither bad nor good. What if it were just that: A tool. I realize this is akin to arguments made by the NRA — “Ads don’t doom people to eternal separation from God, people do.”

Tools can be used for good things. Or for bad things. For example, I just finished building a deck on the back of my house and to do that I used a device called a hammer. It’s a handy thing, this hammer. I used it to pound nails into joist hangers. And to snugly tap 2×6 blocks into place between the overhead rafters in the pergola. I even used it to threaten a stray cat we have in our neighborhood who’s been pooping in our barkdust. Sadly, I also inadvertently used it to pound a nail of a different sort — the one on my left thumb. Now it’s a sickening purplish-black color and more than a wee bit sore. I’m not in the least bit happy about that (and I exclaimed as much just after smacking it), but I think I’ll still keep using hammers. After all, what I can accomplish using them outweighs their digit-smashing downside.

Same deal with advertising. Traditionally, the church’s knee-jerk reaction has been to shun what could be learned from the pages of Communication Arts and to instead store-up canned goods while scanning real estate listings for a good deal on bunker property in Eastern Montana.

Meanwhile, a whole generation of lost people becomes more and more lost.

That wasn’t the model Jesus gave us. He hung out with hookers, people with disgusting diseases and pagans who were very much a part of their culture (for better or worse). He also berated those who set themselves apart from culture and who labored to uphold the law in an effort to be seen as righteous and religious.

I think Jesus would recommend the church use all the tools we have at our disposal to reach the people who don’t know him. Even if that means leveraging the same ones also used by Larry Flynt, Nike and Victoria’s Secret. Because if that’s how people are accustomed to interfacing with organizations, why should we require them to operate differently when the subject turns to eternity?

Now, more than ever, The Great Commission needs a great media plan.

Over the years I’ve had a lot of friends who are art directors and designers. And early on, I realized they’re the ones who drew the short straw when it came to workload on the creative team. Sure, we writers face the infamous blank page every day, but once we fill it with a few hundred keystrokes, we go to lunch. Meanwhile, it’s the art director who spends hours kerning type, sitting through photo shoots, going on press checks at odd hours of the night and trying not to slice off the tips of their fingers with X-Acto blades.

Which makes the following metaphor strangely appropriate: in the world of communication, art directors are the tip of the spear. Consider any newspaper ad, CD case, book cover, magazine article or web banner that’s caught your eye. Before you ever got to reading the words that I and fellow writers have carefully knitted together, it was how the thing looked that got you to read it in the first place. Stuff that’s poorly designed never even registers; it disappears into the ether, down the rabbit hole of Wasted Marketing Budget.

When I used to commute by ferry, I’d watch as fellow commuters thumbed through the Seattle Times on the way across Puget Sound. On one side of the page there would be a full-page ad I knew cost a small fortune and, if it looked awful, readers would blow right past it; they’d turn the page without hesitating. But if it looked cool, more often than not, my fellow commuters would take 2-3 seconds to at least read the headline. Those are the 2-3 seconds we marketers work so hard to earn. More clients, I think, should commute by ferry. Their advertising would be more effective.

In the old days, people used to knock on your door and try to sell you stuff like encyclopedias and vacuums. (They still do that sometimes today, but now they’re called Mormons.) Forget what year it is for a minute and imagine you get a knock on the door one day. You abandon the episode of Dr. Oz you’re watching and walk across the room to turn the knob and see who it is on your porch.

Now a question: Who would you rather see standing there and, more specifically, who would you be more apt to listen to a sales pitch from: (a) a guy with a bad combover, paunchy gut, light blue suit and white loafers, or (b) a guy with a nice smile, fashionable clothes, square jaw and smelling of Axe?

That’s the power of art direction.

Done well (read: nice typeface, powerful photography), people are more apt to at least hear what it is you have to say. Done poorly (read: comic sans and clip art) you’re dead before you even begin.

Now consider what this means when it comes to marketing Jesus. People are already predisposed to be leery of being sold things that sound too good to be true. Like, say, eternal life. All the more reason churches need to embrace powerful marketing and effective. A small handful get that, but the majority view marketing as worldly and evil; something to be relegated to the church secretary and a copy of Microsoft Publisher. As proof, just look at how their ad in the Easter Services section of the newspaper is designed. Or the font used in the PowerPoint with words to the worship songs.

This should not be.

People don’t throw a switch in their brain that makes them respond differently when they’re viewing something “Christian” than when they’re viewing something “secular.” The same principles that apply to developing effective brand communications on Madison Avenue also apply to developing communications on Church Row.

When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. So much so that I wound up changing grade schools every two years. My third grade year, I began attending Dundee Elementary, a Rockwellian school in Oregon’s Willamette Valley on the highway to the ocean.

To show our spirit, like most schools in the ‘70s, we had really cool T-shirts: 100% polyester, navy blue torso with white sleeves complete with red and blue stripes and stars. With an impish cartoon of the school mascot, the Dundee Devil, printed on the front. When I wasn’t wearing my Cub Scout uniform or my favorite, tattered football jersey, more often than not, I could be found wearing that shirt.

My best friend, Derek, however, didn’t have one. His family was Catholic and, he explained one hot afternoon while picking strawberries, his mom wouldn’t let him wear anything with a picture of the devil on it. Even if were just a cartoon silkscreened on a fabric of questionable breathability.

Seemed a bit extreme, even to my nine year-old, agnostic sensibilities. The Exorcist had come out about five years prior and, as far as I could reason, there were few to no similarities between Linda Blair and the smiling, pitchfork-wielding fellow on my chest.

We humans, it seems, have an inherent problem acknowledging the existence of a person named Satan. A quick Googling shows 92% of people believe in “God,” but somewhere around 68% acknowledge the existence of the devil. Granted, that’s still more than two-thirds, but quite a bit less than God’s popularity numbers.

I blame this on the people at Hormel. Not only was it them who created SPAM back in the 1930s, their art directors are also the ones behind that deviled ham character. The one with the pointy tail and creepy, submit-to-temptation-and-come-eat-pork-from-a-can smile on his face. Ever since, many have had a hard time taking the idea of Satan all that seriously.

And he likes it that way. As C.S. Lewis brilliantly illustrated in The Screwtape Letters, getting people to either deny the existence of demons or to become overly obsessed with them are his two most fundamental strategies of deception.

In this age of the Internet, human genome mapping and Bill Nye the Science Guy, am I actually suggesting Satan really exists?

Yes, I am. There’s too much evil. Too much depravity. Too many greedy people. The very existence of things like sex trafficking, porn and child abuse are all the proof I think anyone could ever need.

Sorry to be such a downer. I’m generally a glass half-full kind of guy. And I don’t hold to the demon-behind-every-tree philosophy we Christians are often accused of. But there’s a naive arrogance in our age; one that thinks we are far too advanced, far too evolved, far too modern to have use for any silly characters like the devil. Instead, I’m of the camp that, like Green Day says, it’s important to know your enemy.

I got my B.A. in Communications. This was as much a function of wanting to avoid math and science classes as it was wanting to work in the field. Along the way, one of the lower level course requirements for all of us Comm Arts freshmen was a class about the fundamentals of communication theory and I remember it well.

My professor, who wore pressed khakis and sported a bushy mustache like a news reporter on the NBC affiliate, spent a good deal of time talking about how any form of communication required two things: (a) a sender, and (b) a receiver.

Really? Gee, thanks. That’s helpful, I thought. Maybe I’d been too quick in my decision to avoid pursuing a more left-brained degree. I’d heard the pre-med students were dissecting goats that morning.

The thing is, as painfully obvious as that whole McLuhan-esque, sender/receiver statement sounds, it gets forgotten by us grown-up “professionals” way too often. Instead, we marketers have become preoccupied with creating fancier names for them. “Receiver” sounds too rudimentary. Too generic. Too Monday Night Football. So research firms slice them up into an ever-growing number of target demographics, metrics, segment codes and other impressive-sounding terms.

But at the end of the day, as a creative person tasked with delivering a message by breaking through people’s defenses, I don’t need to know everything about who I’m talking to. Sure, it helps to know if they’re male or female, roughly how old they are and stuff like that. But I don’t need to know what kind of car they drive, toothpaste they use or TV shows they watch.

Why? Because good, compelling advertising is about connecting with people as people. At a very basic, very common, very emotional level. As human beings — yes, simply as receivers on the other end of the conversation. Effective brands talk with, not to. They’re about being funny. About tugging at heartstrings. They’re not about scientifically parsing consumers into an every-growing number of obscure Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

When it comes to marketing the church, here’s what you need to know about your target demographic: They’re hurting. They’re confused. They’re lost. And they want to be part of a community. Some already call themselves Christians, some don’t. None of them care. They just want to be loved. They all need Jesus.

Last time I checked Claritas, I didn’t see segmentations for “broken,” “hurting,” or “sinner.” But that’s a commonality they all share.

I’m not trying to be hard on churches here. Most operate on a shoestring and are overwhelmed just trying to meet the needs of their congregation. But when attention does turn to marketing and outreach, don’t spend what limited resources you have getting caught-up in research and market studies. Instead, simply focus on connecting with people as people. Let that be your brand voice — the voice of Jesus. When he’s the sender, your message will be received by who needs to hear it.

My first job after college was as a copywriter for Quinton Instrument Company, a medical equipment manufacturer in Seattle. Among other things, I got paid to write ads for catheters, electrodes and heart monitoring equipment.

The irony was not lost on me when, a week ago Monday (some 20 years later), I found myself about to step on a Quinton Q4500 myself. “We’ll be running you through the BRUCE protocol,” the nurse told me as she scraped at my chest hair with a blue disposable razor. I glanced down at the small piles of what looked like eyebrows on each thigh and wondered if I should mention I actually knew what she was talking about because I used to write about the BRUCE protocol. But I decided against it, not wanting to sound like a know-it-all.

Finally, my nuclear stress test was about to begin.

90 minutes earlier, I’d sat sharing the waiting room with an elderly man and his wife who were waiting to have his pacemaker checked until a woman named Kelly ushered me back to a room with more radiation stickers than IAEA headquarters. She explained what would happen over the course of the morning as she inserted a needle into the vein on the back of my right hand and pumped it full of some frigid liquid. I felt my right arm grow cold from the inside-out instead of the more familiar outside-in sensation.

I was too nervous to follow most of what she was saying. I heard the word “isotope” a lot. Almost as much as “then we’ll have you wait,” but I really didn’t care about the waiting. I was just glad to finally be there. I knew that meant an answer — whatever answer that might be — would at least come later that afternoon. It had taken nine long days since my ER visit for chest pains to get to this place. And in recent days, as I waited, I’d Googled every possible scenario. The whole thing might just be stress. Then again, I’d also read stories about seemingly healthy 40-year-olds who’d been rushed to bypass surgery in the middle of their stress test.

What would be the next page in my story: Stent? Angioplasty? Angiogram? Calcium test? Hearty handshake and a lovely Lipitor parting gift?

“The treadmill is about to start,” the nurse said as I started walking, the belt slowly rolling by under my feet. After a few minutes it sped up and the elevation increased. Then a few minutes later, it sped up again and got steeper still. That happened several more times until the angle was so steep I began to wonder if the 45 in Q4500 stood for 45 degrees. “How steep is this?” I asked, gasping for breath. “You’re just over 15 minutes and 25 degrees” she said. “And your heart rate is just about to 160. Are you feeling any pain?” “No,” I answered. But if I let go of the bar I was clutching, I certainly would once I bounced off the wall behind the treadmill.

“Okay, I’m going to inject the isotope now,” she said, reaching for a small strongbox on the window sill I hadn’t noticed until now. Once open, I could see its walls were almost an inch thick. Inside was a shiny chrome syringe. It all looked strangely familiar and foreboding; like something I’d seen on “24.” Then she injected the isotope into my IV and told me to keep running for another 30 seconds. Then, just like that, I was done. The belt slowed down. My heart rate returned to normal. And I was gushing sweat like a wrung-out ShamWow.

Three hours later I was seated in another room, one floor up, waiting for my new cardiologist to offer his diagnosis. He entered, smiling. No white coat, no pretense. I liked him right away. If someone has to cut me open, I thought, I trust this guy to do it. A silly conclusion, I realize; for all I knew he got his diploma on Craigslist, but some people just exude confidence and likability. And he definitely did.

“Well, your stress test was entirely, completely normal,” he said. “You scored a zero,” which he went on to explain is as good as you can score. We talked about a lot of other stuff, but the bottom line was I am fine. And for that, I’m so thankful because the diagnosis could have so easily been so very different.

God doesn’t always answer prayers they way we want them to, but this time he did. With the exception of two annoyingly itchy patches where the chest hair stubble is slowly growing back, I’m fine. And given how things could’ve gone, I’ll take itchy chest hair stubble any day.

Not many people in their early 40s have a cardiologist. But come Monday I will. That’s because I spent most of last Saturday in the E.R. after waking up early with my heart pounding, out of breath and sweating. As I lay there in the darkness, not wanting to worry my wife or daughter asleep on the floor next to me in her sleeping bag (she’d had a bad dream) I didn’t want to think, let alone talk about the possibility I was having a heart attack. It was the elephant in the room. I wanted it to just go away. But instead, it sat on my chest.

Reluctantly, I made the half-hour trip to the hospital. It was quiet when I arrived and I was thankful for that. I’ve been in emergency rooms before and I know the atmosphere can run the full spectrum from terrifying to mind-numbingly boring.

A cute twentysomething girl with funky glasses, red scrubs and a name tag that read Missy greeted me from behind the window marked “new arrivals check-in here.”

“Hi, uh, I think I’m just being overly-cautious, but I’ve been having minor chest pains and breathlessness,” I said. She nodded as she typed rapidly and efficiently on her keyboard. In my head, I was jealous she was so young and so far from ever standing in an emergency room complaining of chest pains herself. Then she made a photocopy of my insurance card and driver’s license and asked me to have a seat.

Not three minutes later, the triage nurse called my name and led me back. He asked for more information which he entered into his keyboard. “How tall are you?” he asked. “Six feet,” I said. He nodded. “And how much do you weigh?” “About 190,” I said. “But I’m really not fat. I lift weights, so even if the charts say I’m fat, I’m really not,” I added, only to quickly realize how stupid that sounded. I was trying to reassure myself that I’m way too healthy of a guy to be in the E.R. with chest pains. “Yeah, I hear you,” he replied. “Those charts… can’t trust ‘em. You need a BMI reading to get an accurate picture.” And just like that, I decided I really liked Mr. Triage Nurse.

He then handed me off to another nurse named Bruce who was waiting to usher me back, smiling with his hands behind his back like a maitre d’ in a fine restaurant. Bruce would be my best friend for the rest of the afternoon. And I mean that. He was great guy. He told me stories about other patients he’d had over the years with similar symptoms, as if to reassure me. He also drew a vial of blood to test for enzymes that are present after a heart attack and hooked me up to an EKG so they could record and analyze my heart and how it was beating.

After Bruce disappeared for a while, I lay there, EKG beeping in the background, and I remembered a video I’d watched the day before. It was from Matt Chandler, the 35 year-old pastor of a large Texas church as he recounted what it was like for him to have a grand mal seizure that rendered him unconscious after biting through his tongue on Thanksgiving day. A couple weeks later, he had a pre-Christmas surgery to remove an aggressive, grade 3 tumor from his brain. “Lord, you gave me this for a reason. Let me run with it and do the best I can with it,” he said. Matt has since undergone, and is still undergoing, aggressive chemo treatments. At best, his doctors say, he has roughly five years to live.

I can’t imagine.

I’ll probably never have the honor of meeting Matt here on earth. But someday in heaven — be that sooner or later — I hope I have a chance to thank him for his courage and what it meant to me in my comparatively cake walk of a health scare. And what it still means to me as I await what happens next.

After the enzyme test and my EKG both were deemed normal, one of the other tests I had was a CT scan of my chest to check for a possible blood clot in my lung. That, too, came back normal. Except for what the E.R. doctor said was “some calcification in your left ventricular artery.”

So I have a nuclear stress test scheduled for Monday and there’s a chance it could reveal a serious blockage in my heart. I am genetically predisposed to that sort of thing, with a family history of heart disease. But ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I’m the guy who orders the salad. Skips the cookies at home group. And only eats whole grains. I’m the guy who runs 10-12 miles every week, bikes 20 on weekends and lifts weights twice a week. I take fish oil, red yeast rice and 1,000 mg of Niacin every night.

But sometimes none of that matters. I’m trying to outrun and under-eat my genes. Maybe that’s working. Or maybe it isn’t. Sometimes seemingly bad things happen to seemingly healthy people for seemingly wrong reasons. Just ask Matt Chandler. Or Jesus for that matter.

There’s a phenomenal school on Aurora Avenue in Seattle called the School of Visual Concepts. What makes it so great is that it doesn’t lie on a lush plot of land with ivy-covered brick buildings that ooze academia. It’s in a tired, concrete building. Right across from the Hostess Twinkie factory. I used to park there and I remember how my shoes would stick to the sidewalk as I’d walk beneath the large exhaust vent that spewed warm air full of syrupy particles.

See, for students attending SVC, it isn’t about a fancy pants building, it’s about learning their craft. Really learning it. And not from a tenured professor in an itchy sweater with patches on the elbows, but from leading Northwest creative people who work a full day in their 9-5, pressure-cooker jobs. Then they head to SVC one night a week to teach the next generation how to become art directors, designers, copywriters and, hopefully, how to avoid getting the same ulcer they have along the way.

During my first three classes, I have to say I was clueless. Honestly. I was terrible. Once during an in-class assignment my friend, Frank (who has since gone on to work for some great ad agencies and produce some great work) and I did an ad for an auto salvage yard picturing a guy clutching an alternator from a ’82 Civic over his head with the headline “Salvation!” on it. We weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

Still, I desperately I wanted to have a career in this business. I was enthralled by the artistic discipline of it. I was fascinated by how hard people labored to write a headline that would make people laugh, cry and think. I also liked the idea that I could get paid decently, have a nice office and wear shorts to work every day. When you’re 23, there’s not a whole lot more you want in life. Except, when I was 23, there was a whole lot more I wanted in life.

I didn’t just want to spend my days laboring to make powerful, creative advertising. I also wanted to spend them laboring to follow Jesus. And so, for most of my adult years, I’ve spent my days straddling two very different worlds. Worlds that don’t really understand what the other is about.

On the one hand, I’ve been blessed to count as friends some of the smartest, most talented people that there are: my advertising friends.

Back in 1989, when I first told my dad (who was also a creative director) that I was following in his footsteps, he wrote an article for a well-respected industry newsletter where he reflected openly on my decision. “The people you’ll meet and sweat and work with,” he said “will be many things. Boring will not be one of them.” As fathers so often are when we look back on their advice, how right he was. These folks are never dull to hang with. Most, though, don’t want anything to do with Jesus. And I don’t blame them. From Catholic sex abuse scandals, to the crusades, to sugary, big-haired televangelists, we Christians haven’t always exactly put our best foot forward.

On the other hand, I’ve been equally blessed to have friends who, I think, are some of the most humble, wise and spiritually aware followers of Jesus anywhere. They know him. They yearn for others to know him. And yet many (certainly not all) are just as leery of marketing as my advertising friends are of Jesus. They think advertising is about creating idols, fostering materialism and exploiting people. To which I say: see log in own eye.

In a recent interview with ChurchMarketingSucks.com, a fellow Christian copywriter named Jon Acuff put it perfectly when he said: “To ignore advertising as the church is to ignore the billions of dollars in research companies spend in understanding people, the same people we’re trying to reach.”

Amen. I can’t help but think how much we Christians could accomplish if we’d stop spewing hot air full of syrupy messaging in favor of walking across the street to take a few lessons from unbelievers who know how to effectively, truthfully and emotionally communicate with people. Maybe we might even win a few of them to Christ in the process.