Pink Air

Interesting, in a bad way

Wells Fargo regularly sends me ads for additional services, essentially spam stuck into my statements, disguised in safety envelopes as confidential banking documents demanding my "immediate attention" and "authorization". It's as if Microsoft were actually behind those fake Windows error message banner ads.

They've also rented out the back of the return envelope to somebody trying to sell me a wind-up flashlight:

Classy, huh?

You would expect a bank to know that a financial statement isn't just a great medium with 100% reach. It's a privileged, confidential communication. If I don't trust the information I get in that envelope, I don't trust my bank.

And this small, repetitive, inadvertent violation of trust weaves its way into my entire experience of Wells Fargo. Their profit is up? I wonder how much of that is from customers duped by the fake "official" envelopes. Interesting foray into Second Life. Does the virtual wind-up flashlight billboard actually light up?

Interestingness cuts both ways.

Advertising and law

The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.
                        - Oliver Wendell Holmes

It's time to stop asking whether advertising is an art or a science. It's neither. But if you're looking for a useful analogy, I like law.

Law, like advertising, is a set of practical codes designed to influence behavior, not describe an apodictic truth like the nature of physical reality or an artistic vision. The "truths" sought by law and by advertising are relative and dependent upon consensus.  There is no single, independent standard of success, immune to social opinion. Not even ROI. Rather, there is a fuzzy hubbub of standards many of which are really no more than codified social opinion.

Do these analogies matter outside of barroom arguments? Maybe not a lot. But they are worthy of some present consideration because analogies with art and science tend to mask the fact that advertising success, like legal precedent, is a social, consensus-based phenomenon. Today, as the industry struggles to evolve into an era defined by internal team-building, interagency collaborations, one-off project teams, consumer-generated content and other social phenomena, certain assumptions which have been dragged over from idealized, obsolete notions of art and science (e.g. There must be a correct answer to every question. "Great" advertising is an objective category and must be the work of individual genius.) only limit our thinking about what's possible and encourage unseemly nostalgic grumbling.

Besides, an analogy with lawyers is disconcertingly flattering.

Off target, please

One of my least favorite Things Ad People Say is "...but then, I'm not the target."

First of all, it's weasel talk. Which, by itself, is not sufficient cause for condemnation. Sometimes weasel oil is the only thing that keeps the gears of the ad machine turning. But this phrase (which I suggest we all just shorten to "beetint") is usually deployed immediately after someone has just made an honest, usually negative, assessment of whatever proposal is on the table. What it really means is "I think this is crap, but don't hold me responsible for my opinion." We all know that's what it means. The CD hates you just as much if you don't say it. Why bother? Just explain your position.

The second reason to banish beetint is that the target/shooting metaphor isn't a good mindset for making interesting work. It depicts people as passive prey rather than active minds. If we're stealthy and hit them with a powerful message where they don't expect it, they’ll crumple to the ground where our man Nielsen can tag and bag them. "Ah, the female urban clubber! Very rare and beautiful creature, you seek, Sir. Resistant to print, internet. May I suggest…ads on toilet lids? Silent. Intrusive. Inescapable.”

We are glass

Glass. Gel. Glossy. Glow. Shiny. Plastic. Pill. Capsule. Jelly bean. Whatever you call them, icons that mimic the reflective, semi-transparent nature of glass are everywhere, making the web look like a big bag of marbles.

As far as I can tell, the trend was launched by the Aqua OS X interface six years ago. Steve Jobs said he wanted buttons that look so good you'd want to lick them. Within hours of the demo, knockoffs were appearing on the web. Within days, haters were dismissing it as merely pretty and cute, beneath the attention of the hardcore command line O.G. Within months, dozens of reverse-engineered tutorials on how to create your own glass buttons had been written. And within years, Microsoft got around to putting glass into Windows. All of which is to say, it's interesting.

But why are they so popular? My guess is that they're visual cheesecake. Cheesecake combines a number of desirable qualities (sweet, fat, savory) into an improbable, almost grotesque taste bomb, artificially supersaturated with the taste triggers we've evolved to seek out. Back on the evolutionary savannah, these qualities were rare and attached to excellent energy sources, so we totally pigged out when we found them.

Gel buttons combine an unlikely number of qualities (depth, reflection, transparency) that trigger "realism". They're artificially supersaturated with visual reality, so they're especially fascinating in the arid, 2-D environment of the web savannah.

The natural next phase in the evolution of gel buttons will be to pack in more visual realism qualities like deformation on click, squishiness and realistic motion paths. The puritans will condemn it as yet more distracting eye candy while the rest of us pig out.

Creative rebar and free time

An interesting article in today's New York Times describes how Star Trek fans, tired of waiting for The Next Incarnation, are using the suddenly adequate tools of digital video to produce their own episodes. Which made me think of two things: rebar and "free time".

Rebar (reinforcing bar) is the ridged steel rods embedded in concrete structures in order to increase tensile strength. It was generally made from cheaper, lower quality steel and the big established steel makers were happy to ignore the rebar market in favor of high-quality, high-profit steel. But over time, the mini-mills that made rebar raised their quality until it was good enough for other uses and still significantly cheaper than the product from the traditional mills. And then they took over the market. Publicized by Harvard's Clayton Christensen and Intel's Andy Grove, rebar became the symbol of "market disruption from below."

The rebar analogy has been applied mainly to technology markets, like PC's. And while the Times story does illustrate the disruptive impact of inexpensive digital video systems, it also contains a parallel story about the market for creativity. As marketers begin to emphasize media choices over creative choices and international brands seek increasingly integrated, universal (and therefore, simple and visual) creative ideas, they will naturally begin to see that the cheap talent of the net-enabled swarm is good enough. Throw in the fringe benefit that "We can scare the agency. That's just fun to do." (Mike Fasulo, CMO Sony Electronics), and I think agencies have found their rebar.

The article also notes that "as long as no one is profiting from the work, Paramount, which owns the rights to "Star Trek," has been tolerant." Their tolerance may have to last a very long time. Robert Fogel (U. of Chicago, Nobel in economics) believes that by 2040, Americans will have 50 leisure hours per week and 35 years of full-time leisure after retirement. Creative and distributive technologies will get cheaper and better. That adds up to a whole lotta Trek.

It has become a reflex to look for the business model behind any freely distributed goods, but we may be about to see an explosion in the "free" economy, where people use their free time to produce and freely distribute quality goods for free, just for the love of it.

Two views

The same phenomenon as seen by a philosopher and an entrepreneur:

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.
                        Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

At the heart of any good investment, I tell investors, is a contrarian thesis that they and the company believe very deeply and that the rest of the world thinks is crazy.
                        Reed Hastings, Netflix

The F word

I once made a presentation to a client in which I started by pointing out the number of ways sponsorships can fail and how we might avoid these problems. But I never got to the recommendation because she cried out, in genuine distress, “Failure? We can’t talk to our board about failure!”

They went out of business two years later.

Hooray for ignorance

Suppose that subliminal advertising actually worked, 100% effective and legal. Would you use it? I always wanted to ask potential clients that question, but never had the nerve. I think it would have been a good indicator of how long the client-agency relationship would last.

For all our talk about the selling power of creativity, most of us are here for the creativity. Selling is just the whetstone, the challenge that gives it shape. If marketing really were simply a matter of following a formula, it would be even less decent and humanist than it is. Despite all the research dedicated to finding such a formula, the lack of a Pavlovian "buy" signal is the only thing that keeps marketing from becoming the evil, soulless endeavor that so many people already think it is. It is our ignorance that forces us to be interesting, to engage rather than manipulate, to treat other people with respect.

22 years late

 
From an article in today's New York Times:

Still, Mr. Begg has hardly been ignored by the administration. Earlier this year, a State Department public diplomacy official, Colleen P. Graffy, challenged his supporters, saying, "Guantánamo is not a spa, but nor is it an inhumane torture camp." The department's little-known Office of Countermisinformation has also sought to refute Mr. Begg's claims.

Office of Countermisinformation. Let's think about that for a second.

Don't be a hater

"Here is what is wrong with the British pop industry.  You've had people writing songs who don't give a shit about the people that buy them and you've allowed that to happen.  You should all be hung, drawn and quartered."

This friendly advice courtesy of everybody and nobody's favorite music production team, Stock Aitken & Waterman. Read the 1987 Smash Hits interview and substitute "advertising" for "pop music". Oooh, creepy!