The word "verisimilitude" popped into my head for no very good reason as I was getting my cup of tea this morning. The only place I've seen the word used in recent times is in a column by Dan Gillmor in which he discusses junk mail dressed up to look like something important. (It's the second part of the article; the first part is about VeriSign and the Internet domain name system, a matter on which I make no comment today.)

"Verisimilitude" is a noun meaning semblance or likeness to truth. It can also be used in a "merely" sense, implying that the verisimilitude in question is merely a likeness to truth, and not actual truth; or even a wilful deception. Note, however, that this connotation is not essential; it can be used in a benign sense.

The word arose in the context of a vice-president-for-brand-marketing trying to justify junk mail that did its darndest to look like it was mailed out to the customer urgently and with no expense spared so that he might be informed of this vital information as soon as possible. (It may help if you imagine all the words from "mailed" to the end of that last sentence as one super-word-joined-by-hyphens — I just didn't want to inflict typographic brutality on you by actually doing it.) You're probably familiar with this tactic already: spam email and viruses often pull the same trick of trying to look important or appealing. Said VP noted that advertising "uses all kinds of devices to get people's attention", and that we're all subjected to a vast amount of marketing material. This, in turn, she opined, meant that marketeers had to work extremely hard to break through all that clutter.

Let's think about that state of affairs for a moment, shall we? In the first instance we have junk mail dressed up as something important, and this is justifiable because they really want to get our attention, and there are a lot of things competing for our attention. This is like having a lot of people shouting at you, so the people who really want you to listen have to shout even louder. Then the other people who really want you to listen try to shout louder than that so that you hear them. All the "clutter" that the marketeers have to break through to do their job is created by other marketeers, and they "break through" by being an even more obnoxious grade of clutter than everyone else. Ho hum.

It occurs to me that the targets of all this clutter are pretty fed up with it by and large. I know I am, and I haven't had anything as blatantly false as the "Urgent Express" letter that forms the central subject of Dan's rant. So how are marketeers to break through to people who are trying to block them out? Become sneakier? Shout louder? As often is the case, I think the best approach might be to go against the trend.

What I would like to see on my junk mail is a bit of honesty. I'd like my phone companies to send me bills that look like bills and junk mail that looks like junk mail. In fact, I'd like to have the junk mail in an envelope with a summary printed on the outside. "This is to advise you of our new cheaper rates for long distance," it might say on the envelope. "If this is of no interest to you, you do not need to open this envelope." I would throw such an envelope out immediately because I don't make any long distance calls worth mentioning, but I would come away with a positive attitude to the advertiser. I'd be thinking, "thanks for not wasting my time, guys — I'd much rather deal with you than that other mob that's always trying to trick me into reading their junk."

This is not exactly an original idea: the joke of blatantly true advertising being more effective than its dishonest counterpart was a central premise of the movie Crazy People (1990). But as with most comedy, it's based on a truth: the way to stand out is to be different. I seriously think the pendulum has swung so far in the "try to look like something that you're not" direction that the "claim to be exactly what you are" approach has got to have something going for it. So far as I can tell, however, most marketeers think that straight honesty is a bad idea; that marketing is all about gloss and spin control. I don't expect to get honestly-labeled junk mail any time soon.