Pre-Christian Cristal
From "Advertising in the Roman Empire":
An ad for a tavern in Pompeii reads in part, "If you will have given the sum of two asses, you will drink better wines; if you will have paid four, you will drink Falernian wines."
The Blue Apple
Apple's "I'm a Mac/PC" ads are lovely to look at, amusing and go right to the heart of Apple's corporate kulturkampf. While each ad is broadly focused on a technical superiority claim, the real message is in the characterization: Macs are for cool people. PC's are for, well, uncool people.
As Seth Stevenson pointed out on Slate, there's a bit of a cultural faux pas here, as uncool is the new cool. PC guy, played by John Hodgman of The Daily Show (and really, how cool is that?) does get all the laugh lines and is actually more likeable than his hipster counterpart. But I think Stevenson is missing the point when he faults the ads on the reverse likeability gap. For me, the kindly portrayal of PC guy is part of Apple's "Make love in order to make war" strategy of running Windows and Office, making sure iTunes and iPods work on pc's, generally making nice on the network and protocols front, etc. It's a great strategy and these ads pay it off.
Having said all that, there is more than a little condescension in the ads which, in my experience, accurately reflects the attitude shared by Apple and many of its fans. Is that a problem for Apple? I don't know. Because at this point my mind keeps wandering to parallels with the Liberal/Conservative divide in America. And here I believe that condescension is a problem. When I listen to Apple dude in these ads, I hear the voice of Liberal America. He's saying things that I agree with. He's saying things that I think are important. I'm more than willing to buy what he's offering. But I'd rather have a beer with the other guy.
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?
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.
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.
And lo, the screen fell wine dark
Nothing is interesting, but anything can be. It depends on your point of view, the context of information you bring to bear.
I've been reading about the history of English, and I'm both delighted and disoriented by the parallels between Old English and the modern Dutch I hear (and try to speak) every day. Infinitives that end in -n, participles that begin with ge-, cognates, vowel sounds, verb placement. The word numb, for example, comes from Old English niman (modern Dutch nemen) meaning "to take". It's actually kind of creepy. Now a typical, everyday phone call is like travelling back over a thousand years to pre-Norman Britain, when grave Saxon warriors tore at the dark heavens with sharp lamentations about their cable service.
Why do the critics rage?
In today's New York Times, the movie critic A. O. Scott takes a surprisingly touching look at "the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves". What can it possibly mean to say that a film like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is a "bad" movie (as most professional movie critics do) when it just had the biggest opening weekend ever? Isn't the box office the only proper place to judge the quality of popular entertainment? What are critics for, exactly? He writes:
The obvious answer is that art, or at least the kind of pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art, often pops out of commerce, and we want to be around to celebrate when it does and to complain when it doesn’t. But the deeper answer is that our love of movies is sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and even of the people who see them. We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you.
Does that ring a bell? Do you remember the first time you went home after you started working in advertising and your aunt said, "You're in advertising! Did you do that nice ad where the girl finds her kitten and then has a hot bowl of soup?" You couldn't help thinking, "Thank god, no", but then couldn't shake the feeling that if your aunt liked it and remembered it, who were you to say it was crap? Scott stops just short of answering this question for me. I would have added one more paragraph:
There is an unavoidably elitist quality to being a critic that comes from having seen thousands of movies. That's a lot more than most people. So when I talk about a "good" movie, I mean one that stands above most of the many others I've seen rather than one that will be only an enjoyable way to spend a Friday evening . I'm all for enjoying Friday evening, but I'm really thinking about what I believe you will find interesting, worth thinking about after you leave the theater and maybe, hopefully, even years from now.
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