This is Andrew Hovell's blog. He lives in Northern England. He plans for a living. He likes tea. He's as confused as you are. He doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person.
In sharp contrast to the dumb trailers that followed. GI Joe, Abraham Lincoln The Vampire Slayer (!!), another Underworld film etc. It all smacked of a desperate industry relying on special effects and endless re-boots of old ideas, rather than anything resembling ideas.
The shining beacon within this was the trailer for the third Batman film (I hope). One of the most successful films ever, yes, high spectacle, but dark and takes no prisoners with intricate plotting etc.
Proof, alongwith the numbers Prometheus seems to be doing, not to mention Midnight in Paris doing over $100 million that you don't have to treat people like idiots to be successful.
Sad then, that when it comes to brand communication which is, of course, both part of and competing with popular culture, tends to take the GI Joe route.
So I went to see Prometheus last night (the prequel thingy for Alien if you didn't know). I enjoyed it a lot and it made me think.
I can't seperate the stand alone film from the original Alien, which I was just old enough to watch while it was still relatively new and hadn't dated (it still stands up).
I loved that film, and accept that much of why I enjoyed Prometheus is the adding to that original story. The thrill of the Space Jockey imagery, the prototype face-huggers, the exomorph on the mural and THAt ending with THAt creature. That film and those iconic moments mattered to me, and enriching that is pretty special.
Just like I how grew up with Star Wars and suspect my generation loved that more than any pre-teen generation has loved any form of enertainment before or since.
The prequels that eventually followed were disappointing of course, doomed to never live up to expectations, but to be honest, I still went a little misty eyed when Yoda pulled out his lightsabre, when he rumbled with the Emperor and, most of all, the silence when Vader's mask went on for the first time and then he started THAT breathing thing. I just cared too much about this world to not feel something.
So it's funny when agencies and brand managers alike talk about making brands 'stop interrupting what people are interested in and BECOME what people are interested in'.
How many ads can you remember that really did this? Left you gasping to have the story enriched by more content? And don't get me started on banner ads and 'social stuff'.
Think about the THOUSANDS of communications campaigns hurled at us every year. You can count on one hand those with any sort of genuine cultural resonance, and even then - The Old Spice Guy, The Meerkat, Papa and Nicole, the Nescafe Gold Blend couple - how much do you really think people care when these things are killed off? Maybe a little sad, but begging for more?
Doubtful. Brands are useful, we might have affection for some, even love one or two, but if anyone is crying out for more Old Spice stuff, rather the Dark Knight or even Transformers 4 (yes, it's planned), they're a little wierd.
If you start every brief with the objective, 'Be culturally significant' or, heaven forfend, create a Lovemark, your rate of success is going to be pretty dire. Even the experts at making culturally significant stuff make plenty of duds. The amazing success of Harry Potter is outnumbered by failures like Eragon and The Golden Compass. Geeorge Lucas may have done Star Wars and Raiders, but he also did Howard the Duck and Willow.
Failure is built into the business models of film studios and record companies.
It isn't part of the business plans of clients.
Being realistic, its should never be about love, it should be about getting noticed at all.
I really enjoyed this Do Lecture from Alan Moore, about how changes in technology are fundamentally changing our behaviour, like movable type did. You might have heard this argument before, but basically; top down organisations are going through their last throes of success, the future will be communities doing it for themselves (it's more nuanced than that of course, but..well, just watch it)
I don't know if he's totally right, but I'm not so sure and I think that's my point: no one does. History is littered with little flags placed in moments in time where someone has pronounced 'The Age is this' 'The death of that' but usually, it's nothing of the sort, it's a little wobble or a bit tacking in the general direction of getting a little better.
I agree that we're all getting more bolshy when told what to do and suspect kids are even worse at accepting hierarchyy than they've always been, but just because our penchant for community is being freed up a little again, but surely that doesn't mean that how we live in communities per se will change?
All communities have hierarchy and leaders - it doesn't matter if that's human communities, chimps or Lions. The strongest stag earns his right to be at the top of the pecking order, the male with the most impressive plumage gets first pick of the females, think we're going back to that...we still want leaders, we still want organisations and institutions to help us live our lives, they'll still guide and soemtimes even tell, but they have to earn our respect, love and adulation, it's no longer theirs by right or due to size, money or whatever.
For brands and stuff, that just means there's no excuse for crap products or marketing that's boring or insults the intelligence. But while we want to partcipate, we still want things that surpise and delight us, things we can't do for ourselves. Yes, we'll enjoy noodling around and making and sharing our own stuff, but we can't be arsed to do the great stuff ourselves.
In other words, make something great and then let me join in.
That's why 'brand as verb' 'brands as conversations' is so much hot air - the good ones always were, it's just that now, no one has to put up with the bad ones.
Remember these? Good weren't they? Who says that brand storytelling etc is anything new? I guess the only thing that would be different now might be each character having their own Facebook account, the book, the extra episodes online, the exclusives and the leaks and maybe even releasing new characters and story arcs to hardcore fans and maybe letting them in on the story.
The dynamic at the heart of the story is unreleased sexual tension. It's not the only beating heart to a good story, but it certainly is a good one.
Like this..
This....
This..
And this.....
And this ;-)....
But it's not in this (nor any chemistry whatsoever)...
Like most good elements to a story, we can relate to UST because we see our own lives reflected back at us. Something ad people and genuine entertainers could do well to remember, we want new stories of course, but in reality, we want stories to talk to us about our own lives. It's just that it's usually more powerful when the context isn't humdrum real life but something else. That's why I get annoyed at so called down to earth, community focused clients wanting to only exist in hyper-reality - people don't want their own lives played back at them exactly. Look at soaps, they are not reality, they're exaggerated in almost everyway.
I wanted to pick an argument with someone who opined that Shakespeare is overrated. Fair enough if you consider the emphasis he gets in schools over other's (even Ben Johnson in his own era), but there's a reason. No one has consistently told us about ourselves in a collection of works like Shakespeare, mostly because he has the knack of dealing with universal truths and issues by placing them in unreal settings.
The debate over Shylock - understandable victim of prejudice or a warning against greed is echoed in arguments today over someone as a terrorist or freedom fighter, layabout or forgotten generation.
Rosalind in 'As you like it' was a great source of inspiration for some work I did on dressing up and being able to play with your appearance and identity - how wearing a costume changes you inside - or brings out a version of you hitherto unknown.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if you're making an ad, writing a book or scripting a film, whatever the setting, storytelling needs to talk to humans about humans in some way to be truly great and in many cases, it's more powerful when it's not 'real'.
By the way, a useful rule for UST is the same as food - if you lick it, you have to eat it.
One of the things being a Dad makes me lament is the passing of those times we could go see a film whenever we wanted. Which was plenty.
However I fully intend to see Scott Pilgrim, mostly for work related reasons. This might sound daft, but I think it got things anyone involved in brand communication need to think about very hard and very quickly.
Hollywood is scared. Forget the record revenue figures and look at the actual individual sales for films and you find they are down. One theory is that people that have grown up on multi platform doodahs and video games just don't enjoy linear, one way 90 minute pieces of entertainment (and there's downloading of course).
What is Hollywood doing? Rather than embracing a bit of complexity and treating their audience as the sophisticated people they mostly they are, they trot out the same old blockbuster crap, aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator.
They turn to ever more incredible effects, refusing to accept that when people get used to the spectacle, they soon found out you've left out an actual story. I'm not a Harry Potter fan, but it's the story that people love. The Dark Knight may have been a sequel to Batman Begins, but it was the story, the depth, and the acting that made it...and it didn't even have a happy ending.
Have you seen Robert Altman's The Player? You should. It's bitingly observant - not just about Hollywood but marketing in general.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should to anyone who is still trying to make message based ads, but don't get smug digital people, you're worse. Some of you believe that people will fall in love in the coolness of your technology. when course that Wizard of Oz moment happened long ago. They're seeing behind the curtain and finding nothing but a charlatan. Even worse, some of you know this but know you can still make money selling this to clients - which, all in all, is just as bad as making Transformers 3, or other even more pertinently as far as Scott Pilgrim is concerned, Prince of Persia.
So back to Scott Pilgrim. It's not a film that blatantly rips off a video game, it's a film that IS a videogame. The plotting, editing, aesthetics have as much to do with a video game experience as a movie. It embraces the new culture, it doesn't rip it off or blatantly ignore it.
That's something marketing people really need to learn. Ignoring how people consume and enjoy culture is bad, papering over the cracks with coolness is worse, it has the opposite effect and, most of all, getting involved with stuff they love only works if you do it with 100% commitment.
Bits of Hollywood are starting to get this. The Matrix is one the first, and best examples, of a complex story told across multiple platforms - the films left much for DVD extras etc to fill in, and even more for forums and fansights.
TV is way ahead of course, with multi-layers and channels. From the depth of the Sopranos and The Wire, to the number of platforms Dr Who is now told across.
That's why I got interested in the apparent green light for film version of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The books are not for everyone, I happen to like them. But a complex story told across 7 books, with yawning backstory for the reader to fill in (or buy the graphic novels if you're that way inclined) with strands that appear in other books, if you can be bothered to read them, just can't be adapted to cinema without losing most of what makes the books good (in some people's opinion.
So they're not. They're filming three movies with on ongoing telly series to wrap around them. Here's hoping there's a video game that complements and adds to the narrative rather than just re-works it.
Of all people, George Lucas seems to be way ahead of the curve. I could write a saga on the prequels and why they were better than received wisdom seems to think, but few would disagree they lost the charm and story of the originals. Yet Lucas has created a mammoth universe you can take as far as you want, through books and games. Some of the games are just shoot em up, but most actually add to the saga and reveal new bits and bobs, if you care about that. And you don't even had to read or play them...you just join in a forum and share with those that do.
Anyway, I'll be interested in Scott Pilgrim because it's a great example ( I hope, I haven't seen it yet but people who have seem to give it the thumbs up) treating your customers with respect and staying relevant. Marketers (and the rest of Hollywood) take note.
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