It was our little boy's first day at Jolly Tots (day nursery thing) by himself today. We had discussed if he would be OK by himself, if he would scream for Mummy or anything like that.
When it came to it, he just hurtled in, without saying goodbye and started playing with the other kids.
First time we've experienced that the hardest part of being a parent is letting go.
I read something about a Dad and his teenage daughter. How the Dad fell the shock of loss when his daughter ran to her new boyfriend when she arrived off a train, rather than her Dad.
We got a little of what that's going to feel like today
As a little boy who grew up with Star Wars, not to mention a Dad myself these days, I love this.
Dad Vader captures the joys and frustrations of fatherhood told through answering the question, 'What if Darth Vader had tried to bring up Luke like a normal Dad?'
Worth thinking for ads and stuff. sometimes the best way to convey the truths, merits or dynamics of something is to place it in an unexpected situation.
Make the familiar unfamiliar.
There's plenty of reasons why this works as far as humans go. We're hardwired to notice new and surprising stuff and filter out the familiar. Putting the anything in an unexpected situation, even the most familiar and banal makes us pay attention, which is, of course, gold in this over-supplied world.
One the most loved films from my childhood is Mary Poppins, which, of course, it really just a story about a family that has forgotten have fun together.
The underrated City Slickers conveys loads of stuff about male anxiety about being the 'other directed man' , mid-life crisis and male anxiety by subverting the cowboy ideal.
While Mad Men actually makes similar points about the hollowness of modern consumer society, the middle class ideal and and the conflicts beneath the surface of corporate men who go to ever greater lengths to feel something in jaded world.
Everyone loves Carousel, but while I admire the pitch as much as the next agency hack, it's the juxtaposition of the the corporate guy and the loving father unable to reconcile both or even give them the love and support he so desperately wants to that makes it so powerful for me. The struggle between doing what you want and what you should is timeless.
While the inability to externalise what a man feels inside, either because you are not allowed or you simply cannot is not limited to older generations. Go to any pub and watch young men bonding through shared mockery and bickering and you'll see what I mean.
While we're at it, his toe curling embarrassment at Bizou Bizou, skewers the stilted reserve that presents so many limits on what men (and women) feel able to say and do. Who hasn't felt uncomfortable, rather than electrified around spontaneous people who are able to have fun?
And of course, there's the tried and tested time-travel story. In the case of Back to the Future, familiar teenage themes given a new lease of life in the 1950's.
The Jetsons, the Flinstones and the Simpsons - all stories about family relationships.
The Sopranos (I think) is all about confused roles modern men find themselves trying to fulfill - the conflict between traditional macho identity and more modern, metrosexual roles.
On the other hand, this, our Italian American, ganster panda conveys product quality for Fox's without having to spell it out in the conventional ways that no one really notices.
Stella Artois 4 conveys it's Franco Belgian heritage, and the 'smooth' badge value of the brand by setting it in the 1960's French Riviera
And of course, the Smash Martians conveyed the ease of using Smash rather than peeling, chopping and boiling your own potatoes.
A lot of this is brand mascots of course, but much of it is finding the right situation and setting.
I've long wanted to steal the premise of the Incredibles- the struggles of a family with superpowers trying to get by in the modern world, with a bit more of an 'Outnumbered' tone - for an outdoorsy family orientated brand, aimed squarely at the anxieties modern Mums feel about their kids getting out and playing, growing strong and independent in a world where they simulate fun on a Wii or Xbox connect rather than actually having it.
Or, come to think of it, take the idea of exaggerated masculinity to the extreme for a shaving or beer brand, with a funny,modern take on the idea of a male comic book hero at once poking fun at the category and male cuture at large (where most brands seems to only the answer of new-laddism) while conveying the true modern masculinity as embracing the contradiction in modern male identity - the strong, capable superhero AND the sensitive, vulnerable, more feminised alter ego (or is it the other way around?).
I always thought this bit of dialogue has a killer insight on this:
There's an old saying, "Ask 6 economists a question and you'll get 7 answers back", which sort of applies to creative, brand, advertising types too.
Look at this article about Tesco and the advice shared from industry luminaries. Look at how everyone has a different answer to the problem, in fact, one doesn't even think there is one.
If you haven't read Why Most Things Fail by Paul Ormerod then you should. He shows with proper data (yet wonderfully readable prose) that organisations cannot hope to predict what will happen to their business, markets and the economies they operate in are exposed to far too many complex variables, at the heart of which you find capricious human beings who are wholly irational and refuse to behave like the textbooks say they do.
The only way to really future proof youself is to move forward or die, continuously innovating and creating that future, because no one, no matter what bollocks they spout really knows what will happen.
This what I think has happen to think has occured here. I agree that they forgot to make people care about them, but I also think they just stood still. Rather than innovating in a recession, or before it, not leading, they followed and cut prices.
Compare this to what someone once told me about Sainsburys. Back in early 2000's is was on it's knees. The 'experts' in this business said they needed to go back to advertising that made them 'good food heroes'. What this person told me was that the infrastructure was in pieces.Food quality wasn't quite as good, but even worse, basis distribution wasn't working.
Shoppers, first and foremost need to know the things on their lost will be on the shelves day in day out. They were not. Sainsburys new they needed to get their ducks in a row before even thinking about changing the communications. Even more telling, a considerable segment of Sainsburys shoppers WANTED Sainsburys to do well, they were frustrated and tried to shop there anyway, or would come back as soon as they believed the cock ups would end.They didn't need to feel good about the brand, they actually wanted it to be a succces.
How many people want Tesco to do well?
So it's probably fair to say that ads and stuff might help to recapture the public's imagination, but that's not Tesco's only problem because I doubt the problem is just a 'brand problem' . It's fundamental strategy on pricing, range and services - these are things that ads won't solve and need to be looked at too. But good agency partners can, and should, want to help with the strategy that informs this.
While Tesco sat on it's hands, Sainsburys and Waitrose changed their business model. When the economic shitstorm hit, they didn't just cut prices, they re-developed their entire offering with more value ranges and choice. Then they made people feel good about it. Morrisons on the other hand suffered orginaly by being too downmarket and re-developed their fresh 'market street' concept.
Which also says something about the danger of brand models that force a business to doggedly stick to a rigid positioning come hell or high water.
One final thing, look at the advice from Interbrand. Talk about giving someone a hammer and all he sees is a nail (Mark Twain), tone of voice? TONE OF VOICE!!!!?? Only a brand consultant could come up with that sort of advice. And I fundamentally disagree with Tesco cannot be a 'cuddly colossus'. Her insinuation is that very big companies can't make people feel strong emotions, can't make them feel something.
I know that these are very different markets, but here are some behemoths that make their customers feel something.
I went to TEDx Bradford on Friday, which was mostly pretty good but it’s not what I’m going to talk about today.
Because I went to a breakfast thingy with some artists before; that was the REALLY good bit. It was at the National Media Museum, where they’re launching Life Online, an exhibition about the internet. That’s right, the internet is actually old enough to start appearing in Museums.
Makes me feel old. My nephews are 18 and 20, for them the internet is like air, it's fundamental to their lives and has always been their. Anyway.
They’ve commisioned an exhibition on open source culture and the threat to net neutrality. Your views on this are your own (they think curbing freedom and ‘free stuff’ online is mostly bad) but what I took from the work wasn’t much to do with the subject, it was more to do with the brilliance of ‘post digital’ stuff and interactive design to free up new forms of creativity and inspire people to do all sorts of things together- in the real world.
Not using all their spare time as Clay Shirky would claim, which is frankly bollocks, and always will be until people stop having to work for a living, but around the edges, little spikes of entertainment and interest within the fabric of the everyday.
Ross Philips has created Read Aloud, an installation that that invites the public to perform lines from a chosen book in a collective effort to read the entire work.
While it enables us to experience literature, poems ore whatever in a different way, I think it captures the idea that any piece of content is always unfinished until people actually experience it, none more so than books where we asign mental images of the places and people portrayed, we hear their voices in our own heads and respond to them in different ways (like the way some see Shylock in Merchant of Venice as a sympathetic character pushed to the limit by discrimination, while others see him as a villian). That’s always worth remembering when you create content – leave room for people in there.
This idea of the way the internet lets people collaborate together to make real things, in the real world is also expressed in his ‘videogrid’ concept that has been used at the Liberty Store in London, The V&A and by Nokia, where people touch a screen in a window to have a 1o second video made of themselves, automatically uploaded to a gallery existing as a real life and virtual video wall.
This is the V&A version:
People really will do stuff for you if it’s fun, not too much effort and if there’s an end result they’ve influenced in some way. Instant feedback and instant results help too. Worth thinking about when you’re considering ideas people will play a part in – think about why it’s fun and interesting for them, rather than just pushing your agenda. Think about instant, or quick, real time results. Digital is about now, if you’re going to make it about ‘later’ make the result worth waiting for.
Content that lots of people have had a hand in tends to work really well for brands, because it tends to cut through more. The above stuff isn’t that different to Nike’s Chalkbot
This got lots of headlines and social media traction because of the people element – we’re social animals and like doing stuff together. It gets picked up by the press and people just like sharing it more. The value of the people that interact is negligable, it’s not nearly enough to alter sales figures or brand scores, but the noise and headlines they make IS.
Rather than presenting a finished ‘thing’ present a simple system for people to work in.
I love this idea of a portrait made of webcams, it just shows how much amazing source material is there for us to re-purpose if we use our imagination. Naturally, a lot of good digital creativity is about newness, but equally, it can be about what you can ‘hack’.
Then there is their ‘Flat Earth’ a desktop documentary which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world to encounter fragments of real people’s blogs, knitted together to form a single narrative, over a visual effect created from satellite imagery, that looks for all the world like Google Earth. You can view it on their website.
All this stuff demonstrates that thinking about the people experiencing the internet just on screens, be that a laptop, phone or TV isn’t the half of it. The internet will increasingly be about linking objects and imbuing them with all sorts of stuff. It will be about the real life context of where people are and what they are doing.
It will be about the real life we are living, not the virtual one.
By the way, while I was there I also loved Forms, in their Blink of an Eye exhibition.Sport isn't often thought of as beautiful, but there is a grace and artistry to the way athletes move and this work really captures that. Just shows what happens when you apply a bit of (digital) creativity to something to make people appreciate the familiar in a completely new way.
In the so called 'traditional' creative departments, TV, print etc was also inspired by art, it seems to me that digital creativity (is this really a credible distinction these days), if anything should be about this even more, some sort of magical fusion of code and story.
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