Pink Air

Idealism

I'm seeing more of these "JFK for president" posters going up around Amsterdam. (Does anyone know their source?) The optimism and confidence of the quotations is surprisingly bracing. The call to draft a man dead more than 40 years implies a disgust with present-day alternatives. Both the optimism and the disgust are characteristic of idealism, for which Kennedy is a natural symbol. He isn't usually ranked among the greatest of US presidents, but his relatively high showing is attributable as much to the enduring appeal of his idealism as to his achievements in office.

Idealism is an incredibly powerful motivation that grows stronger as the general social environment grows more cynical. It's like the gas in a piston that gets compressed until it explodes. It also works the other way: as idealistic programs fail (and of course, some will) and the speakers of idealistic words are shown to be flawed (and of course, all are), cynicism swings back into fashion.

As Jerry Maguire said, we live in a cynical world. And judging from public opinion, we the people who work in advertising bear some responsibility for that. And yet, we're not an especially cynical bunch as far as I can tell. So I'm wondering, what does a marketing idealist believe? If you were asked to talk about your work here, what would you say?

Brand aura

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York with my friend Ted. He pointed toward a small glass case and said, "This is my favorite part."

Inside the case was a small red notebook, flipped open to a page on which Darwin had written "I think" over what is likely the first depiction of an evolutionary tree.(1) When I realized what I was looking at, I had to manfully restrain a sudden impulse to weep. You may say I'm just a wuss, but you are (tragically though forgivably) blinded by the Fundamental Attribution Error. I blame it on the aura.

I came across the idea of aura when I was doing branding research for a museum. One of their main questions was about the role of museums in an age of ubiquitous digital reproductions. Walter Benjamin (the patron saint of interestingness) used the word aura to encompass what is stripped away when an object is mechanically reproduced. He noted that many "art" objects were originally produced as religious artifacts whose unique position in space and time was what gave them value. Without the uniqueness and authenticity of the original, copies have no religious value.

I think of aura as the fingerprint of interestingness. Objects with a historical, physical connection to what we find interesting(2), will induce the sensation of aura: religious, mesmerizing, a kind of "stepping into the light", a satisfying yet unsatisfiable, quasi-physical engagement with the mental stuff of interest.

The commercial nature of brands gives them a huge advantage over other sorts of ideas when it comes to aura generation. While a typical authentic artifact, like Darwin's notebook, must be unique to create an aura, a branded product can be (re)produced millions of times with no decline in aura per unit.(3) Because in many ways the product is the brand while a notebook, even from Darwin's own hand, is not the idea of evolution.

Also, you interact with a branded product in a much more intimate, personal way than you can with typical aurigenic artifacts, which are usually sealed up in glass boxes and not much good for wearing, playing or eating anyway. You have the equivalent of a speaking part in the brand play, and that's much more compelling than being one of the anonymous, weeping extras filing past in the museum.

(1) Please pardon the crappy cell phone photo. I was using the "crappy" filter on my cell phone.

(2) Does this make the objects themselves interesting? There's a conceptual tangle here.

(3) Isn't this something a cartoon villain would say?

3 plus or minus 1

You're probably familiar with the sometimes misinterpreted idea that short term memory is limited to seven (plus or minus two) pieces of independent information. My personal corollary is that I can remember only three (plus or minus one) interesting things about anything. This phenomenon is disturbingly scale-independent: I can remember only three things each about my childhood, World War I and what I ate for breakfast this morning.

I spent five years studying psychology. Here are the three interesting things I remember:

1. The Fundamental Attribution Error. We tend to explain the behavior (especially bad behavior) of others by the kind of person they are ("Ashlee Simpson is a fake") and our own behavior by the particular circumstances ("My drummer hit the wrong button and/or I had acid reflux.") I recognize this error everyday in myself, in respondents, in the news. In fact, any randomly selected newspaper front page can be usefully interpreted as a series of proofs and variations on the Fundamental Attribution Error.

2. The mesmerizing power of irregular reinforcement schedules. I was reminded of this by the ad above for a bank account tie-in with the Dutch lottery. Every month you have the chance to double your balance and enter the Lotto drawing. For this, you accept a lower interest rate which, as the website cheerfully points out, might be less than you would spend on an equal number of Lotto tickets! Isn't there something brand discordant about a savings bank/lottery relationship? Aren't savings banks the champions of regular reinforcement? And why does regular reinforcement seem morally superior to irregular?

3. Everybody is interesting. Our minds are too complex not to throw off an ongoing shower of unexpected, incomplete, meaningful stuff that's worth thinking about. If someone seems boring or shallow, it's because you and s/he are not in the right situation or relationship to one another. Change the situation. Ask a different question.

Intrusive (in a good way)

 
It was hot. So hot that my friend Anita left the big, street-facing, first floor window of her Amsterdam apartment open and unintentionally fell asleep. The next morning, she found the footprint-shaped card you see above just inside the window. It says (in Dutch):

This shoeprint could have been from a burglar...

Very effective. Very personal. Much more so than a call the following morning because it's not just saying that someone might have come through the window, but that someone (effectively) did. Now that's channel selection.

And great branding from the Amsterdam police. Anita not only says she will never, ever leave the window open again, but she's showing the card to all her friends. I think because it not only says "We're watching out for you". It displays a sharp understanding of attention and memory. Like a burglar, the message is silent, unobtrusive and therefore, all the more alarming. It makes me wonder (in a good way) about who the Amsterdam police are. It makes them interesting.

Brand patterns

Dan Funderburgh (via PingMag) is a designer specializing in patterns and what he says about patterns is also true of brands:

• What makes a pattern interesting is the balance of repetition and irregularity.
• A good pattern is not just attractive eye candy, but is based on an idea.
• "Ideally the pattern would be completely handrawn, no part would perfectly mirror any other, every element would fit in to every other, and yet each would be unique."

That last statement would be a great manifesto for almost any modern brand. Which makes sense. After all, a brand is a pattern.

Toxoplasma and you

One of the most useful skills a planner can have is to be interesting. Have interesting stories to tell, interesting analogies to make and interesting facts to share. Here's something my friend Ted, former bond trader/current middle school science teacher, told me about that falls into all three of those categories: brain-controlling parasites. Surely you know something or someone who can usefully be described that way.

No, really.

Nishad suggested that it would be interesting to hear how you all would define "hip" and that it might be more complicated than defining "cool". I think he's right and would very much like to hear some different perspectives on such an important word. What do you think? How do you define hip? How is it different from cool?

What is hip?

Modern marketing is thoroughly steeped in notions of hip (finding it, co-opting it, synthesizing it) but we've never settled on a sturdy definition of it. We've passively adopted a juridical "I know it when I see it" heuristic, which often leads us to mistake surface attributes for True Hip. Particular attributions of hipness will always be subjective, but a basic definition might provide a useful starting point for many discussions and help to avoid some of the worst travesties.

So as a starting point for that starting point, here's a gloss on some key extracts from Hip:The History, John Leland's excellent (though not without its critics) historical survey of hip:

Clarence Major, in his study Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, traces the origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi ("to see") or hipi ("to open one's eyes")...So from the linguistic start, hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia.

What hipsters see with their wide-open eyes is that mainstream culture is a confidence trick designed to get individuals to take on roles that are not really in their best interests and that limit their freedom. (Leland never says this, but I think it's a fair and useful extension of his analysis.)

At its most pure, hip is utterly mongrel. Which is to say, purism has no place in hip...It is inclusive, open. When people try to get too pure about it, hip leaves the building.

Once rules begin to form, power accretes. Hip fears and despises institutionalized power, so the truly hip are always ready to change even if it means leaving their rule-bound acolytes behind, like Miles Davis going pop in the 80's or Bob Dylan's successive embraces of electric guitars (Newport, 1965) and lingerie (Victoria's Secret, 2004).

If hip is a form of rebellion--or at least a show of rebellion--it should want something. Its desires are America's other appetite, not for wealth but for autonomy. It is a common folk's grab at rich folks' freedom--the purest form of which is freedom from the demands of money.

Hip is not revolutionary despite its sometimes rough and angry surface, its opposition to the mainstream and the way it is often (mis)used in marketing. Hip actually likes money and would never survive if there weren't always outsiders willing to pay to get in. But like Nietzsche's christianity, hip is only a pose of power adopted by the powerless, essentially no more than a stylish and defiant "NO", which is one reason why "hip company" is always going to be kind of an oxymoron. Successful companies, by definition, have power and are most certainly not trying to free you from the demands of money.

Companies can, however, partake of hipness, not by hiring underground directors or getting artists to do wacky viral videos, but by proving that they:

• Believe in and support individual freedom
• Question any received wisdom or standard way of doing things
• Have a sense of humor and flexibility about themselves and their identity
• Know that having stuff, even the stuff they sell, is not the most important thing in the world

All of which simply confirms my 8-year-old intuition (shared by both Leland and Nike) that the hippest, most happening character on this or any other planet is Bugs Bunny.