Pink Air

Interactive effects are the future

Brian Eno once said something like, "Effects are the future." Since I can't find the exact quote, I get to make up what he meant by it.

Computers get a bum rap from many artists, partly because machines have long been assigned the wrong role in the creative process. They were touted as substitutes for human judgment which demeans both machines and humans.

What computers are good at is storage and variation without prejudice. This means that, like a creative ad agency, they produce a lot of weird and trivial stuff. But every so often they make something that is interesting: valid, beautiful, useful, unexpected, out of the blue, sensible, open to competing interpretations, concrete, emotionally resonant, inspiring, generative, worth thinking about. And as Paul Arden said, a few of those usually make up for all the other crap.

I've been using Ableton Live for some time now because I find it relatively easy to produce things I find interesting with it. That is largely because I focus on the accretive, almost geological, application of filters and other sorts of effects rather than trying to produce interestingness ex nihilo. I tend to start with a simple melody or rhythm, then add or subtract multiple effects and connect them via a few parameters so that there is a little bit of feedback going on. A little bit of interaction between the elements of a mix is important because it means that the ultimate result is coherent. The ear perceives a relationship between the sounds even if I didn't put it there explicitly. And coherence is what distinguishes an interesting result from a beautiful mess.

A few days ago, I discovered Motion, Apple's motion graphics program contained in Final Cut Studio. I now divide my life into Before and After Motion. Motion uses visual effects in a way that is similar to Live and other music software. With just a few filters exchanging a little bit of information over and over again, something big and complex and interesting can pop out. And since Live and Motion can also exchange some information, you can create interesting synesthesias with just a few clicks: Download Synesthetic mandala

The fact that this looks like an animated Grateful Dead logo begs the distinction between interesting (active) and mesmerizing (passive). In fact, there is some discussion among educational psychologists as to whether interesting material actually requires less active attention than boring material. It seems likely that we process interesting things more deeply, creating a mental model of the relationships between the parts which we can then manipulate, trying out variations not explicitly defined in the original material, rather than simply applying more attention to interpret it verbatim as we do with boring material. Which means:

1. As a brand holder, you want people to process your messages at this deeper level. Interestingness is much more powerful and inexpensive than effective frequency.
2. Interesting brands are brands that people find it easy and pleasurable to generate variations on. Generativity is a way to measure interestingness and should be a core brand measure.
3. We learn and create by generating and trying out possible variations on things. Like computers. And neither humans nor computers are demeaned by this shared characteristic.

Miners

Like planning, data mining (AKA KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)) is kind of leaning over the edge of facts to select from a set of more or less risky possibilities. So besides being something that planners might find useful, it's also a field that planners might find interesting, in part because KDD's efforts to automate the process of finding the most valuable among the huge number of patterns discernible in any large database has led them to contemplate the nature of interestingness.

There is no standard definition of interestingness among the miners. That would go against their gritty and perverse nature. But there is wide acknowledgment that interestingness is central to their task (“Data mining can be described as the process of finding interesting patterns in large databases”) and that it is usefully decomposed into a number of sub-criteria:

Interestingness differentiates between the "valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable" mined association rules and those that are not--differentiating the interesting patterns from those that are not interesting. Thus, determining what is interesting, or interestingness, is a critical part of the KDD process.

Different authors produce different lists of criteria...

...but in general, the miners' blueprint of interestingness overlaps to a surprising degree with intuition and my more scribbly formulations. Novelty, validity, surprisingness, range, peculiarity(!) and utility are all there, each one intriguing if not entirely self-explanatory (I see that as my job), and the "ultimately understandable" criterion is consistent with the observation that delayed comprehension can be more valuable than immediate understanding. At least, it should make us reconsider our definition of comprehension.

Insights into interestingness are everywhere, but data mining offers an especially rich, data-driven yet thoughtful lens through which to view and address our own interestingness management issues. What makes "Just Do It" such a concise, surprising, useful idea to so many people? What contextual knowledge ("domain expertise" in minerspeak) is required for a campaign idea to be novel rather than just weird? "Novel, surprising and peculiar, yet valid, useful and ultimately understandable" could describe a leverageable pattern of purchase behaviors mined from the slag of last week's retail numbers. It could also be a critic's response to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or a viewer's take on a chocolate ad featuring a musical gorilla. Each of these things is worth minding and potentially valuable because first of all, they are interesting.

The Curious Emotion

One benefit of my stuttering career path is that I have smart friends in a number of different fields, one of whom kindly sent me a paper a few weeks ago called, Interest: The Curious Emotion by Paul Silvia, psych professor at UNC Greensboro. It turned out to be just one of Silvia's publications on the subject of interest and interestingness.

I was relieved to see that some of my guesses about interestingness are supported by actual research:

• Interest is the result of two appraisals: novelty/complexity and comprehensibility. (I think depth or range of application is also involved.)
• Interest and pleasantness are unrelated

I wrote to Prof. Silvia and he wrote back that advertising and educational psychology could have a fruitful conversation about what generates memory, engagement and interest. I think that's true.

Blink

A MAN'S EYE

EXTREME CLOSEUP. Open wide. The man's skin wet, speckled with soil and flecks of blood. His breathing CLOSELY MIKED -- erratic. This man's in shock. The SOUNDS of INSECTS and ANIMALS other-worldly. A blink.

Then, the REVERSE ANGLE: staring up hundreds of BAMBOO STALKS. Sunlight almost impenetrable through the dense forest.

SLIGHTLY WIDER on the Man's face as he stares upward, disoriented, stunned. 40-years-old. Fit. In normal circumstances, one glance would make you feel confident in him. Trusting. But here, now, he's the one in trauma.

His name is JACK.

At this point, about fifteen seconds into the pilot episode of Lost, I turned off my mobile phone, smiled and thought, “This is going to be interesting.” If you’d called me at that moment (on the landline) to ask what I meant, I probably would have snapped something like “I mean it’ll be worth thinking about!” before hanging up in an equally rude manner which I now regret.

Since then I’ve calmed down and thought a bit more about both interestingness and what I saw in Jack’s eye and I’ve come to see that my initial definition (interesting = worth thinking about) begs a more relevant underlying question: How do we decide that something is worth thinking about before we’ve thought about it?

Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? We don’t probe the potential depth of all stimuli in a uniform, experimental way. Instead, confronted by some overwhelming number of directed messages per day (let alone the infinite number of undirected ones), we behave like any other animal snuffling through its environment: by responding instantly, unconsciously, reflexively to signs. The bright colors of a poison dart frog are enough to warn (or deceive) potential predators: This is poison. Do not investigate further. And frogs, in turn, are automatically drawn to a particular visual sign, an intermittent motion pattern, whether the object displaying that sign is the promised tasty bit o’ fly or just a tricky experimental apparatus.

So I’m wondering, what are the signs that say, “Trust me. This will not bore you. Nor will it simply yank your attention chain for a voyeuristic moment during which we will attempt to imprint our logo on your retina. This will be worth your continued rational, emotional and practical engagement”? What makes some things immediately seem interesting to us before we know whether they actually are or not?*

This question is increasingly important for advertisers as the commercial messaging environment becomes more crowded, largely by swarms of “teasers”: relatively small, information-poor messages designed to encourage “click through”, literal or figurative. This includes web banners, AdSense blurbs, urban spam, 1- to 5-second ads, billboards or anything else primarily intended to drive viewers to a website or some other high-engagement experience. Like all touts, they want to get you inside to spend some of your hard-earned (attention), but they’ve got very little time (maybe only a blink) and space to do it. What signs will make the most efficient use of that tiny stage?

Based on some desultory snuffling, my first guess is that a thing that seems interesting has one or more of these characteristics:

• It’s new (To the viewer. In some way. We tend not to be interested in things we’ve seen before and think we understand.)
• It promises to reveal unexpected regularities in the world (This is important as it rules out the uninteresting novelties of static/noise. But it also needs a lengthier explanation than I can fit here so I’m going to leave it for now and come back to it in later posts.)
• It promises that those regularities will be discoverable with a relatively minimal effort (“Relative” meaning just that we tend to pick the low hanging fruit first.  I’m sure I’d discover lots of novel and unexpected (to me) regularities by reading a physics textbook, but the effort required makes the prospect distinctly uninteresting.)
• It holds the interest of trustworthy sources. (As Jen says, “If The New Yorker wants to tell me why the color blue is fascinating, I’ll listen.” The effect of this sign is heightened when it’s not entirely clear why those sources are interested (i.e. “buzz”)

Somehow, this list manages to appear both obvious and wrong at the same time. So now I intend to improve it, to make it more specific, by throwing examples against it and looking at how it relates to things like storytelling, insights, spectacularism, Low Attention Processing, brief writing, boredom, creativity, Coca-Cola, how (some) advertising works, web navigation, crying babies, media ecology, the lameness of teaser campaigns, the value of curiosity, tracking, music marketing, what makes a good planner and why I eventually lost interest in Lost despite the apparent reflection of low hanging, unexpected regularities in Jack's eye.

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* The word “interesting” is often used to describe anything that displays the signs of interestingness, whether or not what’s behind it actually turns out to be worth thinking about. By this definition, there is no mere seeming to be interesting. Seeming to be interesting is being interesting. If, however, you, like me, have ever fallen for a bitterly disappointing teaser campaign, you will agree that these two ideas should be clearly distinguished from one another for the sake of both clear communication and personal mental hygiene.

Conflict + beauty = interesting

A lovely quote from Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man, a series of essays on the state of English football circa 1965:

What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art.

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.

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.

Interestingness

Howard Gossage famously (but not yet famously enough) said:

The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it's an ad.

This obvious, brilliant observation reminds us that advertising has to compete in the cultural big leagues whether we acknowledge it or not, right up there with Flaubert and Shakira.

He also identifies exactly what it takes to succeed at that level: you have to be interesting.

The idea that ads, and more importantly, brands, should be interesting is perhaps so obvious that it never even reaches our consciousness. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t get the attention and resources devoted to relatively paltry goals like recall and “message comprehension” (We’ve now shown you this ad that says ‘Krispy Kookoos drive me Krazy!’ three times. What would you say is the main message?)

Or maybe it’s thought to be the writer and art director’s job, which effectively seals it inside the black box of “creativity” and lets the rest of us off the hook. (In any case, I think it’s a mistake to champion “the value of creativity”. Creativity to what end?)

Whatever the reason for its current neglect, being interesting is quickly turning from marketing advantage to marketing necessity. Because as we all know, the so-called “audience” is rising up out of their seats and taking the stage. If they don’t find your brand worth, not just listening to, but doing something with, your budget won’t go very far. Even the biggest advertisers no longer have the wherewithal to unilaterally broadcast themselves to victory.

So I’m going to spend a little time poking around interestingness, what it is and how to work with it.

And as my main example, I’m going to use one of my all-time favorite campaigns: Gossage’s Pink Air ads for Fina gas stations.