New Hampshire has joined a bunch of other states in implementing a ban on all smoking in restaurants and bars. A lot of the do-gooder liberals who support this faulty premise of protecting me from myself also wish to raise the tax on cigarettes. Does this seem a little disingenuous to you? Well it does to me. First off, cigarettes are a legal product. If it’s so bad for me why not ban it all together? (Oops, I forgot we tried that back in 1929 with booze didn’t we? How did that work out?)

Some folks in this country need to get their heads out of their…excuse me, this is a family blog so you will have to guess where I was going with that side comment. We are not and should not be a Nanny State like so many enlighted folks seem to think. I don’t need you to protect me from the evils of smoking. I quit 11 years ago because my cute 6-year old daughter asked me to.

Smoking is a legal product. So why do we treat it as a pariah product on one hand and then tax the hell out of it in another? MONEY—that’s why. The taxes on tobacco in this country pay a lot of government costs. You want to protect me from something? How about fixing the mess we call healthcare—now that would be worthwhile. But hell, that might be too hard so you’ll go after the smoker and make him go outside to smoke.

I thought I lived in a state whose motto was “Live Free or Die”? Well it seems some of you insist on taking that freedom away from me. I did not elect you to do that. While people’s health is important, and I acknowledge that smoking is not good for anyone, stop making the smokers of the world outcasts in society. We have way to many other problems. Iraq is one of them.

Yes, I know the big topic the past week was that our beloved Patriots Guru of all things football was called out as a cheat. But hey, his fine was minor compared to what happened in Formula One Racing (http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory?id=3598167). But that’s not what I really want to talk about this week.

Over the years in this business we have all heard the comment there is no such thing as a new idea—just a reworked new idea. In any other industry it might be called plagiarism. But in our industry it’s called “creative.”

What I’m trying to say is this. There have been more times than I care to admit when we have been part of a presentation where the potential client wanted “spec” creative. (As a side point, I don’t like doing spec because you never have enough information to do a credible job.) So you do the spec and then you find out another agency won the pitch but you see your creative used six months later by the new agency! In other words the client liked your creative yet liked the other agency better for some unknown reason.

And it’s not always just spec creative. Sometimes it’s an idea for a promotion, the name of a product, a media direction—but whatever it is, if you came up with the idea and weren’t the one to execute it (or get paid for it!) it’s a stolen idea. We can label our creative as copyrighted but that gives you little or no protection today if someone slightly changes what you did to call it their own. And, as for promotions and budgets, it’s hard to put any copyright on those things.

I know it’s part of our business—but it’s still cheating.

My good friend Jody Reese, Publisher, Entrepreneur and all that crap, www.hippopress.com, is on a rant. And trust me there is nothing fun about a rant from a guy who buys ink by the ton. So to try and placate him (maybe get a free lunch), today’s lesson is about CONTENT!

Why the caps, you say? To emphasize that ads and press releases must be creative to get attention. I don’t care if you’re buying space in newspapers like Jody’s (hey two plugs one blog, I’m thinking steak), or the Union Leader, (oops, maybe soup), WZID Radio, WGIR Radio or WMUR-TV, if it’s not creative I don’t care what you are selling. Advertisers have got to stop worrying so much about price and placement and start worrying more about what the hell they are saying.

The best location for your ad in any medium, or for your press release, is worthless if it does not have a compelling message and folks that means WORDS. If you cannot afford an advertising agency like mine I understand but at least talk to your sales rep and get some advice about how to say what you need to say. And my other pet peeve is trying to fit the entire Encyclopedia (oops showing age again) in the ad. Less is more. White space is our friend. And that’s why this week’s blog is this short. Go forth and rewrite those ads and press releases.