What is Good Advertising

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In describing The Elements of Style, Morgan Meis said,

“language is simple, direct, and expressive… except that it's magical, dynamic, and unfettered. [E.B.] White looks at Thomas Paine's famous sentence, "These are the times that try men's souls." He tries switching it around to, "Times like these try men's souls." It crashes to the ground. Why? We simply do not know. No explanation seems adequate…The first sentence is better and we damn well know it. We don't know why. But we know it, as certain as the hand in front of one's face, the rain falling on the plain.”

I mentioned a shitty derivative execution by Trident with Single Girls, or better known as the mass marketing death knell of the manufactured flash mob.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLj5zphusLw&w=545&h=330]

But why exactly is the Trident video so painful to watch when the T-Mobile ad that begat it is such a pleasure?

We could say that great advertising tends to be the most original. Except T-Mobile was fantasticly thievish, just a little higher up the food chain.

So what does make great advertising? Or great anything? How would you describe something that’s good versus something that’s not, be it movies, television shows, a blog post or a letter to the editor.

Obviously, it depends heavily on the context. TV shows need great acting, or cinematography, emotive writing, whatever. But none of them are the sum of those parts, and generally, the things that work simply have an indescribable spark. And usually that just means they are the product people whose tastes and temperament tend make sparks happen.

In other words, some people got it, and some people don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually the people who outwork and outthink and outunderstand that are the people that "got it." So it probably has less to do with something bestowed from above and more to do with the hustle to make it work.

It’s the people who are able to find the simplicity in a message, without sacrificing the threads of magic and complexity that keep it interesting.

Social Derivatives & Brand Influence

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It’s interesting to find how brands can be easily and more directly reflective of cultural blips simply because of the fact that new memes are much easier to discover.

For instance, Noah Kalina used his daily photos as shorthand for his own life’s journey.

The journey which the NBA co-opted for its “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. They similarly told their stories through still photography, using the same score that was originally written for Noah. The Rebel Xsi went back for round three, telling simple stories through photography with a track reminiscent of Noah’s.

Charlie Todd’s Improv Everywhere went sharesville by pausing about 200 or so agents in the middle of Grand Central station and filming the reaction.

T-Mobile spun it by giving it a theme song and a dance routine. Trident took a whack at it with the far less successful Single Ladies flash mob (who’s failure is probably a subject for another post).

I would call these executions Social Derivatives, marked by a semi-obscure creative influence while seamlessly using familiarity to breed favorability.

These social derivatives form a sort of tacit reverse sponsorship. Or a shorthand to say a brand’s human alter-ego might be into the same things the audience is into, while equally reflecting something new, exciting and mostly undiscovered by the mass.

So it’s great when brands can create their own cultural contexts, but it’s very difficult for most brands/people/things to be unabashedly original all of the time. At the very least, most things are borrowed most the time.

But we can use our much larger distributional platforms, our big brand voices, to bring these small interesting pieces of content/conversations/experiences and help them find new audiences who are prone to appreciate them, while giving a nod to all the folks the original material met along the way.

The Socialization of People & Things & Places

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It's interesting to see this shift towards brands as a conduit for socializing in physical spaces, or as David Polinchock would call it, the "socialization of place."

From the past week, we've had the lovely sequel to the Life's for Sharing campaign (with strategy work done by the very brainy Richard Huntington).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orukqxeWmM0&w=485&h=300]

And we've seen McDonald's turn a billboard into an enhanced photo opportunity in the very touristy Piccadilly Circus in London. Of course, they've also got a flickr group for you to share photos, as well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjVYVQOOJA8&w=425&h=344]

Reminds me again of David's Brand Experience Lab and they're super cool theater gaming experience called AudienceGame.


[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6izXII54Qc&w=425&h=344]

Certainly beats an expected reaction to just running a TV advert, no?

Mash the stuff that brings people together with the mobile elements that connect us to objects as well, then we're likely to push these types of experiences even further. To put this in context, I'd highly recommend this talk from Kevin Slavin of area/code from PSFK called "This Platform Called Everyday Life" (via Helge).

http://blip.tv/play/gfNK_YE6g6hf


My favorite quote from the talk, "“Here’s your fucking mobile media plan, it’s a sneaker and a ball and a plant and a truck and a shark."

It's quite fantastic to see these two trends converging so quickly. As we find new ways to bring people together around shared experience, and new ways to create ecosystems between people and things, things to other things and things back to people, there's still a whole bunch of interesting shit left to do for anyone with a little imagination, some empty space and a cell phone.

All the Stuff That's Fit to Type

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Chances that You Will Believe This: High
Graphjambullshitobserver
Books and Music that Make You Dumb
"With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic),Booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence."
Musicthatmakesyoudumb
Visualizing the US Power Grid
Cool stuff from NPR. Our power grid is ffffucked.
Powergrid
Google Commissions "Ads" for Chrome (which I miss since switching to Mac)

More on Anomaly and Lauren Luke
Probably worth another post to describe my man crush on Anomaly. Lauren Luke's new line is about to hit the stores. I'll be watching closely.

Smashing Pumpkins Offer Subscription to Recording Process
This makes 1998 Paul go crazy, and 2009 Paul appreciate a good idea that will translate into another mediocre album.

"Corgan said in a statement, "The goal is to create a working model that is not profit motivated but rather information and access motivated. In exchange for a fixed resource base fans will be let inside in an unprecedented way to the creative process of preparing to make the next (SMASHING PUMPKINS) album while also inspiring an interactive dialogue that will help shape the work."

The Psychology of the Sale
"Over time, the presence of sales can really diminish a brand. I used to buy all my clothes at the Gap - I'm stuck with the fashion sense of an 8 year old boy - but, starting a few years ago, I noticed that everything at the Gap appeared to be on sale. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) It triggers deflationary expectations - why buy the t-shirt now when you can buy the same t-shirt for less in two weeks, after yet another "final" sale? and 2) It erodes the quality of the brand, at least as perceived by consumers. I implicitly assume that Gap has to put t-shirts on sale because they're of lower quality, when the actual reason might have to do with the overproduction of some factory in Turkey, or an inventory accounting rule, or some other banal corporate mistake."

Find What Makes You Human

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Ronald mcdonald vw-busman What makes a company feel comfortable with communicating and the things that make people likable and interesting are inherently different.

Companies like to stay “on message,” repeating the same kinds of things over and over. They like to look the same wherever you find them. They avoid incongruence and disagreeableness. Redundancy is lauded as an exercise in brand building.

Interesting people, quite obviously, are the opposite of all these things.

As I’ve said before, this is probably a function of both nurture and nature for most companies. Decades of training from marketing types expert in the art of the big idea and a natural leaning to avoid risk rather than embrace it.

Secondarily, we know our rational brains are actually pretty irrational. Often our decisions are a product of emotions rationally explained in the aftermath rather than a step by step pre-purchase process.

Wine tastes better when it costs more. We may buy a t-shirt on sale today, but disrespect the company who sold it the next because of some perceived lack of worth. Blind taste tests provide better information for psychologists to ponder than an indication of what products will eventually sell.

Any brand is an amalgamation of every ad, every product experience, every passing mention, every in-life product placement. It’s everything a person has thought, consciously or not, right or wrong. And now there are more opportunities for people to stumble across you than you towards them.

So while big campaign ideas are still relevant for some objectives, a much more persuasive brand is such because of a series of smaller interactions, a brand formed by the sum of all the good feelings from a series of experiences, complemented by interesting narratives, not existing because of them.

This is our landscape. One in which word-of-mouth is the ultimate driver of purchase in a marketplace full of more inputs than have ever existed. One in which reasons for purchase are anything but rational, and most of the subconscious data has more room for disruption from our pre-packaged persuasions.

We can’t build influence in this space by yelling louder. We must be good listeners, engaging in reciprocal relationships and mindful of the needs of others. And to be talked about, we should do all these in ways that people find worthwhile enough to share. Yes, the sorts of things likable, interesting people might do.

In describing advertising today, Mark Crispin Miller said, “The most obvious metaphor is a room full of people, all screaming to be heard. What this really means, finally, is that advertising is asphyxiating itself.”

So instead of choking ourselves to death, the brands who simply choose to breathe will be the ones who win.

(photo via vw-busman)