Certainly there are aspects of public relations where perfection is demanded. There’s no excuse for typos. You probably shouldn’t carry on about how much you love The Wall Street Journal while you’re talking to a reporter at BusinessWeek. When out to dinner with a client after a long day, you probably shouldn’t drink so much that you puke all over the table at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan, yes?

But brilliant PR is risk hungry. Brilliant PR breaks things, bruises egos, makes ordinary people wince. If it weren’t for this, any street urchin could be a PR executive. Some are. Too many are. Too few will risk a little imperfection for a shot at a perfect scoring of a client’s competitor.

An historic post, this. It’s short.

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I was laughing out loud at the advertising execs in TD Banknorth and Target who have completely missed the meaning of the music they use in their ads.

For TD Banknorth, it astonishes me that they could have missed the cynicism of The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony toward money ("…you're a slave to money and then you die…").

Or how Target — apparently with the blessing of the band — missed the last line of Beautiful World ("…it's not for me…") when it decided to use the song in a TV commercial.

The Devo debacle might have been a clever move by the always-anarchist Devo. But I can't imagine that happened at staid, conservative, TD Banknorth/Ameritrade. They musta simply missed it - hilarity ensued.

But the real lesson…the AgencyNext aspect of this is quite clear: it's up to us to make sure our clients never miss the nuance, never are so out-of-it with respect to the culture that they appear tone deaf, as comical as TD Banknorth does.

The fact that the commercial is still running blows me away.

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