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My team at work had a nice picnic Friday afternoon in Menlo Park. Like any good company picnic, this one featured a series of friendly competitions, one of which was a hula hooping contest (no, I did not participate).

An engineer on the team started playing around with one of the hula hoops lying around and was suddenly reminded of that classic Tiger Electronics toy, Skip-It, which you might fairly regard as an odd combination of a hula hoop and a jumprope.

I never had a Skip-It — there is little question that it was targeted almost exclusively to girls — but I remember the commercial very vividly (and was reminded of it recently when it was featured by Once Upon a Win, one of my favorite sites on the web).

The clinching couplet in this ad comes about halfway through:

But the very best thing of all
There’s a counter on this ball!

I can’t help but be struck by this sentiment. A kid could have hours of fun just playing around with this thing, sharing it with his friends, getting some exercise all the while, but the best thing about it is that it counts how many times you’ve skipped it? Really? Can you imagine if someone sold a tennis racket and claimed that the “best thing of all” about it was that it counted how many times you’d swung it? Or a pen whose primary selling point was that it showed you how many words you’d written?

Perhaps these pitches wouldn’t work very well, but the truth is that we do have an insatiable obsession with measurement. Everything these days has to have a number on it, a trend that appears ever-escalating. How many of us, for example, now assess a Facebook profile by glancing at the friend count on the left side of the screen? What kinds of judgments do we make based on this number?

This isn’t just about competition with others — after all, the ad does say that we should “try to beat [our own] very best score” — though that’s certainly part of it. What’s really going on here, I think, is that mathematics has become only the latest in a long line of tools we humans use to reassure ourselves that we are, in fact, real, and we do, in fact, matter — a weapon, if you will, against our collective existential dread. It seems that we find our possessions, our dreams, even our relationships somehow less tangible if we can’t measure them, can’t put a number on them that expresses their value. Our self-worth, and by extension the worth of everything in our lives, is inextricably tied to our ability to identify metrics we can use to calculate that worth.

Marketers have long understood this subtle truth about the human psyche. What’s especially fascinating is that Madison Avenue has managed to make us believe in the sublime expressiveness of numbers that we don’t even understand. The horsepower of a car’s engine, the clock speed of a computer’s processor, the number of grams of fat in your favorite cookie — these are all numbers which we’ve been conditioned to believe are the be-all, end-all of these products, even though only a tiny fraction of us have the knowledge required to evaluate these numbers intelligently, let alone place them in the context of all these products’ other important  attributes. Yet our desperate yearning for the quantifiable, the concrete, makes us willing dupes in this unending, multibillion-dollar confidence game.

I don’t believe this was always true, nor do I believe it is equally true in all cultures today. There is something uniquely American about the cold tyranny of the mathematical; I’m no expert on global marketing practices, but I have a feeling that there are many parts of the world where numbers are not such a central aspect of successful advertising. Meanwhile, there is something uniquely modern about the unbridled hubris that has us convinced that anything that matters, we can quantify, a sentiment I doubt was broadly considered before the twentieth century.

On the other hand, many of the world’s biggest advertisers seem happy to ignore this phenomenon. Have you ever seen a single number in an ad by Nike (besides this one, which hardly counts)? Coca-Cola? General Electric? Apple?

My guess is that, if you asked the CMO at any of these companies, they’d tell you that, yes, advertising that emphasizes the measurable attributes of a product is very effective, but only because it exploits a base human instinct, a visceral fear that if you can’t count it, it might not be real. Truly successful brand advertising cannot afford to stoop to this level, which is marred by bogus statistics, exaggerated claims, and the unabashed hucksterism of an industry whose worst nightmare is that you will break free from your stupefying slavery to the almighty Number. It must instead appeal to a higher sensibility: the desire not just to be more, but to be better. Not just to have something, but to mean something.

Perhaps the conclusion I’m driving toward is that the Skip-It, childhood nostalgia aside, wasn’t really that great a toy after all. Or at least they should have come up with a better jingle.