Pink Air

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. 

Notice how I didn't put an egg pun here

I still don't understand how people can use the word intrusive (that is, "disturbing another by one's uninvited or unwelcome presence") as if it's a good thing. At some level they must know that their message is so worthless that no one would ever choose to pay attention to it. Or maybe there's some zero-sum thinking going on so that, almost by definition, the more intrusive the medium, the less interesting the message.

Which might be how George Schweitzer of CBS was thinking when he decided to promote the network's shows with ads laser etched onto eggs: "We've gone through a lot of trouble to get onto this intrusive little piece of attentional real estate, boys. I say, job done. Let's just spam the place with some egg puns unworthy of a 6-year-old and call it a day."

Against authenticity

Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is full of interesting ideas about interesting things. Like the meaning of the word "whatever", why girls rule junior high and what makes musical preference such a strong badge of identity. But what I think about most is this:

...in a mediated world, the opposite of real isn't phony or illusional or fictional--it's optional...We are most free of mediation, we are most real, when we are at the disposal of accident and necessity.

This clears up a lot of my muddled and disgruntled thinking about "authenticity". I've just never liked the word because:

• Unless we specify "authentic to what?" (and we often don't), we're just invoking vague, nostalgic cliches about sweat and asphalt.
  
• Once you're consciously selecting qualities to be represented elsewhere in order to give a certain impression to a chosen audience (which we often do), you're miles away from any recognizable definition of "authentic".
• It often embodies a hypocritical reverse snobbism according to which people who are poorer, darker or less educated than the intended viewer are assumed to be more "real".

But if you think of "authentic" as "not optional" rather than "gritty" or "real", it becomes a productive and interesting idea:

• I think it helps to explain why young people are generally not so bothered by the "reality" of advertising or special effects or even The Real World. "Illusory" isn't automatically a bad thing anymore.
• By focusing on (lack of) choices, it highlights an important value at work in advertising and the world at large: Status is about the ability to make choices. We look down on and feel guilty about those whose choices are visibly limited.
• It can help you to identify the most interesting and credible thing to say about a company: what is not optional about the way it behaves?

The head of the long tail

Now that Chris Anderson's book has finally come out, there's a new wave of discussion about the long tail, but it's all focused on the tail itself: the low volume, niche, back catalog products that are now becoming commercially viable through low-cost digital storage, search and distribution mechanisms. Who will spare a thought for the poor old boring hits? Won't they also be affected? Or will they just disappear, shrinking away into the mass, Prince and the Pauper style? My guess is that there will be hits, though fewer of them, and that many of them will begin to resemble today's web fads: spectacular, ephemeral and unpredictable.

As we abandon the mass media common for our filter-gated gardens, what will open enough of those gates to become a hit? One well-known skeleton key is spectacle: novel effects and "Can you believe that?" stunts that have widespread, visceral appeal immediately upon viewing. Plot, character and storytelling are just risky complications that may make some audiences more interested, but will also prevent the item from getting into other gardens at all. (I think the spectacular shift is well underway in advertising, where, for a number of reasons, commercials are already being supplanted by animated posters.)

But spectacularism also means that our interest quickly passes. Pure spectacle has no legs. It's not interesting. And with so many more choices of what we actually want to see, hear or read now available, our attention and our wallets are wandering away from the new hits a lot sooner, meaning more chart volatility and faster media product turnover. Special effects laden movies that open and close in a week. Novelty singles that hit #1 and are never heard from again (though they will try.)

This sounds pretty grim. But the long tail also means that hits may become less predictable, which means that at least some of them might be more interesting than they are today. As our filters increase in number, resolution, interactivity and flexibility, their collective functioning will become so complex that the hits they elect will be truly emergent phenomena, seeming to come out of nowhere (at least nowhere foreseen by any marketing department.) Large audiences momentarily cobbled together by the complex behavior of their filters will sometimes converge on an obscure item multifaceted enough to appeal to lots of niches at once. So The Simpsons could still be a hit (yea!) and the beaten path will no longer be a path at all, but a set of disconnected clearings at naturally intersecting points of interest.

Helvetica cartoons

There was a key cultural moment, I'm guessing it was sometime around 1988, when sans serif became more authoritative than serif fonts. You just get a feeling from certain sign boards: I trust what they're telling me. I think this information is current. The people who made this sign have both the technical and human knowledge to get me where I'm going with efficiency and, if not actual warmth, at least a friendly sympathy for my confusion. Because authority is no longer just about knowing. It's about the ability to communicate knowledge in a useful, human way.

Of course, the mack daddy of sans serif authority is Helvetica. Its viral spread is attributable to its oxymoronic combination of modernity and cheerfulness, as well as the practical benefit of flexible legibility. I know that when I arrive home in Amsterdam, the signs in Schiphol airport (which use the Helvetica-like Frutiger) immediately make me feel that I'm in good hands. Though both Helvetica and Frutiger come from Switzerland, they feel very Dutch to me: rational with a dry sense of humor.

I'm beginning to see a Helvetica-like visual style spreading through the web, particularly on the Web 2.0-ish sites of young tech companies. I think of it as "soft cartoon" because the icons are usually a simple, old-style physical tool (e.g. truck, pencil, compass, everything on 37 signals) that's brightly colored and looks deformable, slightly smushy, like a firm plush toy. They're sometimes made even softer by a very slight feathered haze around the edges. Significantly, they are never anthropomorphized.

Icon Factory has added the ubiquitous glass effect to its soft cartoon factory logo to create a superdense signifying bomb of postmodernity: workmanlike, friendly, transparent. But then you'd expect this kind of cutting edge symbological gene splicing from people who are in the business of icon design.   

Like Helvetica and its brethren, soft cartoons communicate both competence and humanity. They illustrate the effort to make technology simple and usable without condescension. They tell you something about the character of the people behind the product (smart, flexible, sense of humor) as well the product itself (does what it says, simple, reliable). More than just Web 2.0, soft cartoons might be the new face of the kinder, gentler Geek 2.0.

Mad, sad, glad

If brands are going to tell interesting, dramatic stories, we're going to have to learn to work with negative emotion. So many briefs and brand manuals mandate a tone that's UPBEAT! POSITIVE! HAPPY!, it's no wonder that the everyday face of advertising is the smiley-faced rictus of a serial Botox abuser. It somehow manages to make you uncomfortable and bored at the same time.

Any screenwriter can tell you that without negative emotion, you don't have a story at all. Problem-solution ads do have a sort of proto-story ("I was unhappy that my teeth weren't white, but now they are!") but the negative emotion is briskly swept away and we're left with an obvious pseudo conflict, too simplistic and incredible to be interesting.

Before it can become more culturally competitive, advertising needs to undergo a quick regimen of emotional therapy:
1. Negative emotions are not something to fear. They're a vital part of being human.
2. It is just as important (engaging, interesting) to express negative emotions as positive emotions.
3. Negative emotionality, in the right context, does not equal gloominess or pessimism.
4. Rigidly repressing negative emotions doesn't make you look happy. It makes you look insane.

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.”