Lately, on Linkedin, Ahmad Matar threw a very interesting post.. (here) "So everyone now is an expert critic of billboards in Lebanon? Is this the new hype?" of course, this reminds me of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody when Freddie Mercury was training his voice before the Live Aid concert and a cat walks away, and he snaps "everyone's a critic". Well, if you judge by social media, everyone is.
As the French film went "c'est pas parce qu'on n'a rien a dire qu'il faut fermer sa gueule" (it's not because you have nothing to say you should shut your trap). But here we are, most people have nothing to say, and guess what? No one is shutting up. Because yes, cultured or not, knowledgeable or not, informed or not, educated or not, everyone wants to pitch in when they have absolutely no idea what they are saying.
Sure, styles differ, how I treat things is different from how Mohamad Haidar does, and yes, we can have difference of opinions - but one does not negate the other because at least he writes with poise and logic and a lot of common sense. My own writings differ from the angle of analysis, but as I said, as long as one is logical within his own frame, why not?
But Mohamad aside, there are very few people who hold their weight, because mostly, everyone is pretending to know - when they are clueless about what they are writing, and totally ignorant for any scientific parameters to judge anything, let alone an advertising campaign. Sure, you can start throwing stones at me, but people, I have managed more graduation projects at university level than you can actually count, and I at least know the difference between "selling line" and "slogan", "corporate" and "tactical", "maintenance ad" and "product launch", "client brief" and "creative brief", and spare me the new names for things as old as time - a "deck" is "slide presentation" for heaven's sake!
But all this is to say, if you have no clue what you are talking about, please be kind to shut up. Because, no, not everyone's a critic.