Pink Air

Lyrical errors

Over the past few years I've been collecting interesting misspellings in memos and e-mails. Some of them are so common ("We need to flush out this idea") that the assumed meaning may have changed. What do you do differently when you think that you're flushing an idea rather than fleshing it out?
Whatever their effect on communication, some of them are quite beautiful and would make great song titles. So here's "In Summery", the first track from my upcoming (2010, let's say) album, "Mellow Dramatic".

Terra Semicognita

If you're looking for something that you've never seen before, how do you know when you've found it? I'm wondering because a few days ago I came across the music of Matthew Herbert for the first time and as soon I heard it, I recognized it as something I'd been looking for.
If this had happened in proper cause and effect order, I might first have thought, "I'm looking for something halfway between They Might Be Giants and Aphex Twin." Then I could have queried something like Pandora or Amazon to find the overlap between fans of each. Though I've never had much luck with those kinds of systems. Usually you get a lot of soundalikes of your seed music when what you want is a non-linear result. Something you didn't know you were looking for.
This sort of thing happens fast and slow at the same time. The recognition itself is immediate. In the first few seconds of listening, I could feel my face forming the "interesting" expression, a furrowed brow with a broad, unconscious smile underneath. This is the face I look for when showing advertising. It's the best immediate indicator of positive interest that I know, more valid and reliable than what people will tell you afterwards. It's not one of Ekman's basic facial expressions, but it should be.
What's slow is the subterranean buildup of information, pushing you towards the moment of recognition. Once I knew Herbert's name, I found that I'd mentally bookmarked references to him for some time, but never remembered his name or did any further investigation  "Oh, he's the guy who sampled all the food in his house. Oh, he's the guy who wrote that musical Dogme thing." With no folder to live in, these bits were in my mind, but invisible.
Really interesting things often feel half-remembered, like a dream or deja-vu. There's a certain amount of pleasant frustration that drives us to find out more, even as we're never fully satisfied that we've grasped it. As if there's a very important personal secret up ahead that's always just out of sight.

Dinner for one

I could try to write a commentary for this, but it's just interesting all by itself.
Simply describing the history and impact of concrete cultural artifacts relevant to a brand, with minimal theorizing and maximum creativity, might be an interesting way to do planning.

people_not_ready

Jen always says that the best thing about living with another planner is that you'll never hear the dismissive phrase, "I think you're overthinking this." Case in point:

I love Microsoft. (Truly, the love that dare not speak its name.) It pains me deeply that one of the most interesting, powerful brands ever seems intent on making itself invisible. This ad is typical. Typical of Microsoft, of bland corporate advertising in general and of the Silicon Valley fantasy that IT will magically transform the power relations and psychology of work. Just add software and we’ll all become inspired stakeholders, no-collar teammates whose confident vision is framed by Oliver Peoples eyewear (1). Brother Wrench! Sister Pantsuit! Let us march forward together and embrace the thrilling adventure of the marketplace!

What’s interesting about this ad is that the underside of the fantasy is also visible. Maybe a Freudian slip by a hurried art director, the repressed has returned in the faces of these two people (2) who look as though they’re caught in the headlights of the confident vision. Meet the people_not_ready.

Zoom in so that you can compare their facial and body language with Cocky Foreman in Gray Fuzzy. The old man’s face says, “I’ve been here 37 years and now this young kid says I have to learn NT-something-or-other or I’ll lose my pension! How can I tell Ellen that we can’t afford to retire?” His folded hands (3) make a sharp contrast with the hands on hips in-your-face-itude of his passionate young co-workers. All he wanted was a steady job when he got out of the Navy. Now he’s being dragged into Wall Street’s cost reduction revolution.

The woman next to him is also not_on_board. But her glassy stare is hiding something other than fear. She’s thinking about how she can get Gray Fuzzy in front of the turbine later and claim it was an accident when he comes out the other end as fuzzy exhaust. Now she’s truly inspired to turn insight into action! In fact, she’s having a brainstorm right now: “I’ll blame it on the new software…”

But maybe I'm overthinking this.

Punishment

Interesting stuff is everywhere in Amsterdam. Like this, my favorite historical landmark in the city, and there are no signs or anything else to identify it. No one even notices it. I walked right by it twice when I first went looking for it. It's the remaining gateway to what was one of the earliest houses of correction in Europe, the Tugthuis.

Opened in 1595 (though the frieze and statue are 17th-century additions), it's usually called the Rasphuis because the prisoners were forced to rasp Brazilian hardwood to make dye. The engraving at the top says CASTIGATIO, or PUNISHMENT just below the serene figure of Mother Amsterdam holding two heavily muscled miscreants in line with chains and a wicked little flail. (There's a great book that explores the gate's symbolism and the minds of the people who made it.)

The best part is that this gate is now the entrance to a shopping mall.

Chic Geek

I stayed at the Hotel@MIT in Cambridge a few weeks ago. It's a very nice, typically design-y place. Lots of blond wood and wi-fi. But as the name implies, they've also got a light engineering theme going, with mathematical formula printed duvets and robot prototypes in the lobby. It's not so much geek chic as chic geek. Kind of like Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks. I'd like to see a hotel where the geek aesthetic was more than skin deep.

Van Gogh video

I was cleaning up my iPhoto library when I rediscovered this picture of my friend Steve with his sons Camden and Brady (hidden) at the Van Gogh museum on their visit to Amsterdam last spring. We were all thrilled to find this video message wall in the lobby because Steve's wife Melanie wasn't able to make the trip and they could send her a 15 second video greeting for free.

What a great idea. I wonder why it isn't more widespread.

But not really

Now that I don't work in advertising every day, some amazingly obvious things jump out at me and I can't believe I didn't see them before. Like, what is the nature of advertising reality? The reality in which Axe wearers get laid in the shower and Air France flyers are all blissfully serene? When you see a woman jump up out of bed and do a frantic dance of joy because she's putting on Nivea face cream, what are you supposed to take away from that?

Obviously, you can't take it as a literal representation of the cream's effect or it would soon be drawing the attention of law enforcement. And I don't imagine that they're even promising that you'll feel like dancing. No, it will be like face cream. Maybe a bit tingly, but I'm not even sure of that.

So much advertising falls into this category: visualization of an exaggeration that everyone knows is an exaggeration, or more likely, a complete fantasy. In other words, no real promise of anything at all. Not even a statement about reality. And yet these are not movies. They're ads. And perfectly mainstream ones at that. Ads that someone thinks will be not just attractive fictions, but communicate a simple, persuasive product message.

Some questions:

• Why should this interest me in a product? If someone said, "This mint is like a forest in winter, but not really", I wouldn't consider it much of a sales pitch.
• Is it just association? e.g. "I'd like to be in a forest in winter. Let's imagine that...Ahhh...that's nice...oh look, mints!" But there's got to be more to it than that. If we were so free in drawing associative links, we'd soon all be schizophrenic.
• Could they just make up any old fantasy? Why is it somehow more reasonable to depict face cream as an MDMA trip rather than, say, like eating a nice brisket?
• How did mainstream advertising end up in this weird fantasy land? It's a pretty big ontological step to go from the reality-based fantasy of "Buy a Cadillac and your friends will think you're a big shot" to the untethered phantasm of "Buy a Cadillac and you'll feel like you're flying to the moon. (But not really.)"
• Is it like going to the movies, where we see Brad Pitt, we know it's Brad Pitt, we've previously seen Brad Pitt pretending to be lots of other different people, we've just read a story about how he and Angelina are in Africa working with orphans, and yet we still get taken up with his character and the story, as if they were real?

I'm not being crumudgeonly or faux naive. In general, I prefer advertising that's interesting and if that involves fantasy, no problem. We're all adults.  I don't expect or even want everything to be based on clear, concrete product benefits. But any ad that uses this trope is almost guaranteed to be boring. And the ubiquity of this particular style of in-between fantasy just suddenly strikes me as kind of weird. Maybe because it doesn't even register as fantasy anymore. It's just ads.

Dating at work

 

Meeting via MMOGs like World of Warcraft is a lot like dating. It's always better to have something else to do on a date besides just sit and talk. Having a straightforward, explicit shared goal like painting a room or storming a castle takes the pressure off the interacting part of the encounter. It provides a framework for socialization. It can also inspire ideas. It gives you a reason to be together so that you can just be together.

Business meetings should be more like dates in that way. Someone should start creating virtual worlds designed specifically to facilitate business interaction (if they haven't already).

Interestingness, Part II

My short definition of interesting is “worth thinking about.” Something is interesting to the extent that, even in its absence, you continue to replay it, develop it, compare it, communicate it, translate it, share stories about it, laugh at jokes about it, use it to understand other things, have an opinion about it, imagine variations on it, seek further information about it, want to communicate with it and with others who also find it interesting.

That’s not a complete list. But there are some things that are definitely not on it. Interesting ads and brands may have some of these qualities, but they aren’t necessary:

• It doesn’t say you approve of it, positively identify with it or even like it. Plenty of very valuable brands and effective ads are actively disliked by significant (though not overwhelming) numbers of people. That’s evidence that they’re interesting to a lot of people and will help both to attract new converts and to further solidify the loyalty of adherents.

  Of course, it would be ideal to be both interesting and universally adored, but I can’t think of a brand that’s pulled that off (not even iPod). Let me know if you can. In general, the relationship seems to become antagonistic once both qualities get above a certain level.

• It doesn’t say that you find it entertaining. Entertainment is a much bigger category which includes lots of things that aren’t necessarily interesting. For example, there are plenty of ads that are well-liked in focus groups but just aren’t worth thinking about afterwards. These are truly funny, aesthetically spectacular, warmly emotional ads, but once they’re over, they’re off the clock, extinct, because they didn’t stimulate enough thought.

  And then there’s Microsoft. Massively interesting brand, but about as entertaining as waiting for Windows to boot, with ads that are neither interesting nor entertaining. Why, Microsoft? Oh, why?

• It doesn’t say that you understand it. Often, the more you understand something, the less interesting it is. There are no questions to consider. No inconsistencies to explain. No mystery. No surprise. No tension. No energy. No life. You know that you love someone long before you come to understand them (if you ever do). This is why simplicity and consistency are not the unalloyed goods that so many marketing people think they are. Complexity is a strong signal that conscious life is nearby.

  But complexity is a cardinal sin in the Keep It Simple Stupid church of marketing. Complexity leadeth unto Confusion and surely we will die. But even confusion can be, not just tolerable, but fascinating when it comes from the right source, in the right dose and context. As a younger, more rational planner, I used to try mightily to get people to explain why they loved Sega ads. The best explanation I ever got was, “Because…they’re just so random!” Yep.

  Applied to brands, K.I.S.S. thinking leads to an expensive, wasteful melee for the limited number of obvious, simple positions in a category. All those fragrance brands battling it out to own “sexy”. Can anyone tell them apart?

  Plus, I just don’t like being called stupid by a stupid meme. It’s a pretty rude way to greet a potential host.

One other thing: When I say that the Pink Air campaign is interesting, I mean interesting to me. Which sounds like a copout, but I don’t see any way around the fact that “being interesting” always means “being interesting to someone”. 

That doesn’t, however, make interestingness purely subjective or unmeasurable. It just means that you have to identify the someones you want to interest before you start measuring its interestingness.