In Thinking, Fast And Slow Daniel Kahneman writes about the lessons about human memory and perception that we can learn from colonoscopy operations.
No matter how long or painful these operations are, patients’ memory of their experience is defined disproportionately by how it ended.
If it ended well, patients are more likely to remember the whole experience as a positive one.
I was reminded of this by a speaker at MEC’s conference last week.
Eric Whitacre is a composer, a conductor, and the man behind The Virtual Choir, an awesome crowd-sourced project that creates spellbinding choral pieces via YouTube.
The most recent piece is here.
Eric heard Daniel Kahneman speak at TED.
He was so taken with this insight about the ends of experiences that he started thinking differently about how his pieces might finish.
A play I saw on Saturday night played knowingly with this insight, too.
At the end of a one-man show, pre-loaded viewfinders (like these) were handed out.
The audience was asked to click in time with instructions. Each slide featured something related to the performance we’d just watched, ironically messing with what we’d seen.
The aim was to play with individuals’ recollection and make audience members knowingly complicit in the writer’s re-draft of our memory.
You know, like a play that billed itself as inspired by Marcel Proust and Charlie Kaufmann would. (It’s called Souvenir and it’s on this week.)
I don’t think we think enough in our world about how things end.
Even if the memory of a pitch lingers longer if you win it.
And the clues are everywhere.
Our conference was in Nice, and the protacted trek back, shuffling from coach to plane to shuttle to train to tube to home, reminded me how the emotional experience of travel can differ at either end, and affect the mood accordingly.
I was talking with Matt Locke recently about this too.
An advocate and practioner of digital storytelling, he’s interested in how good (or otherwise) we are at ending stories that are told online. By and large it’s a skill we haven’t really learned yet.
Perhaps if we did it well we’d benefit from what Kahneman noticed – the the psychological trick people play on themselves.
Matt’s background is in TV, of course.
In that world they’ve started to understand the ending insight.
What used to be called the ‘last episode in the series’ is now known as the ‘series finale’.
Pulling the plug can be an opportunity, not just something to shy away from.
I wonder when our own industry’s storytelling will become as unabashed as our own about finishing things off.
“Complete assimilation really means complete acceptance. The immigrant who is completely assimilated has lost the faculty of adding whatever is special about himself to his country; for any artist, complete assimilation means the adoption of an aesthetic where no lines are drawn and no choices are made. That quality of selection, which is what is at stake when an artist comes across with his or her version of anything, is missing. When an artist gives an all-encompassing Yes to his audience, there is nothing more he can tell his audience, nothing he can really do for them, except maybe throw them a kiss. Only the man who says No is free.”
It was when I went to the Brits. I sat in a box with other people who also have nothing to do with the music industry, and watched the celebratory roll-call. I watched the haircuts and the clothes and the shoes and the wireless instruments that weren’t plugged in. I watched the endlessly moving lights and the stage that perpetually re-built itself.
Having spent the last 10 years easing backwards from the world of popular music – it’s not on the TV, I don’t listen to Radio 1 or commercial radio – I found myself almost laughably ill-informed about the events inside the O2. I’d never heard Emeli Sande sing. I’d no idea what Taylor Swift looked like. I didn’t even know the guy who won Best Male was.
When you’re this detached from the narrative unfolding in front of you, strange things happen. The performative aspect starts to strike you as weird. It’s like some big club that everyone knows the rules to except you. Without knowing the context or content, you realise you’re watching reputations rather than people. Performances not characters.
Robbie Williams seemed like he saw through the whole thing just as much as I did. Given his irony-drenched 90s, this phoned-in version comes off like an ironic take on irony. Irony eating itself.
His song seems to take an awfully long time.
Writing about the Elvis of the 70s, Greil Marcus noticed that, after losing himself in crap movies and a brief, energised comeback, the great man now “performs from a distance… singing as if there are no dangers or delights grand enough in the world to challenge him. There is great satisfaction in his performance, and great emptiness.” (This is from the same book as the excerpt quoted at the start of this post.)
This was what I was thinking of when I watched Robbie. But it spoke to the complacency that the entire shebang stands for. The breathless and incredulous acceptance speeches couldn’t mask the winners’ sense of entitlement. They knew they deserved to be there. They’d been fluffed for it. Any self-doubt is crushed beneath the self-worth that such a showy display bestows on them.
Somehow, an industry that is on its knees finds the time and the money to be this complacent, this indulgent. It’s like putting on a fireworks display as you re-arrange the deckchairs.
There’s no room at the Brits any more for the wayward, the anomalous, the unscripted stuff of life. Real people are shut out – both on and off the stage.
Strangely, they all accept the rules. To paraphrase Marcus, there’s a great deal of satisfaction at the Brits, and very little No; everyone says Yes. It’s also utterly empty.
I was thinking about all this when, on Friday, I attended The Story. It’s a conference, run by Matt Locke. It examines storytelling in all its forms. It shines a light on disciplines and people that are creating amazing experiences. You buy tickets through Eventbrite.
The Story is not the Brits. It isn’t empty. It’s positively brimming with ideas, with experiences, with life.
At lunchtime I was describing my Brits experience to a colleague. Afterwards she mentioned to me she’d thought of this exchange when the final speaker quoted John Updike. The quote is worth capturing in full.
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into your face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen.”
This was Rob Manuel, co-founder of B3TA, GIF-celebrant and, at The Story at least, defender of “the bottom half of the internet.” He used the quote to remind us that the people who occupy the ‘top half’ of the internet can sometimes start to get a bit carried away. Media owners and opinion-formers are becoming very superior. Informally they sneer at the ‘commentards’; formally the media likes to demonise dissent as ‘trolling’.
This is a profoundly disheartening development. It’s elitist, anti-democratic. We know best, says the top.
It sounded a lot like the way I was made to feel at the Brits.
Let’s keep the inappropriate and the uncomfortable and the different at bay. Let’s maintain the ‘natural’ order of things.
It’s bad when it happens to music. It will be terrible if it’s allowed to happen to culture generally.
The Brits is what happens when an industry thinks it knows best, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It’s what happens when young upstarts that don’t fit the conventional or current paradigm have to fight to get heard, before they inevitably prove the industry wrong, take over the world and eventually get co-opted by the very industry that tried to kill them off.
The Brits is what happens when complete assimilation creates an aesthetic where no lines are drawn, because there’s no artistic vision at stake, other than success.
The Brits is, it’s fair to say, the total antithesis of The Story.
What The Story served up was small victories, personal memoir, irrepressible creativity and the passion of real people.
Here was a collection of people who had said No, not Yes. They had refused to accept the rules. And as a result they were free.
It was exciting, vivid, strange, shambolic, and not always the full picture. Sometimes you had to work to interpret the meaning of what was being said. Sometimes it was apparent that having done great work doesn’t necessarily make you a great speaker.
But that was OK. Because asking an audience to work with you can be the most engaging storytelling of all.
This was proper lean-forward stuff. For once I didn’t take notes. I didn’t tweet. But no-one can tell me I didn’t participate fully.
I just listened and then talked about what I’d heard with my friends. The conversations, as much as the talks themselves, led to this post.
With the Brits there are no gaps to fill in, no narrative to be identified with, no insight to be passed on, or misunderstood.
But effective, combinatorial listening in Conway Hall meant you went away far richer than when you walked in.
The point was made indirectly by Rebecca O’Brien, Ken Loach’s producer, when she talked about the challenge of non-narrative documentary. An audience still needs structure even if the film resists a conventional authorial voice. The insight was a useful one. An audience needs just enough scaffolding that it supports what’s built around it, but make it too visible and the audience becomes too passive.
That it was followed by the one ‘bad powerpoint’ presentation – from LOCOG – was unfortunate, but appropriate. The Olympics was a story with plenty of emotion already invested in it by the audience. But the mundane stakeholder presentation behind it showed too much scaffolding. Exposition nearly killed the story dead.
Like the Brits, and 70s Elvis, and as Rob Manuel pointed out, our mass-scale storytelling is in trouble, and not fit for purpose. It’s full of people being seen, not seeing. It doesn’t so much celebrate the unconventional as assimilate it. By handing down to us the things we are supposed to be interested in, it becomes complacent, flabby, and stale with the fixed paradigms of entertainment constructs. It renders audiences passive. It treats people the way children’s media treats children – like someone else, somewhere else, knows best.
But the people in charge don’t always know best.
They’re just in charge.
The Story showed this loud and clear.
We heard about the economists who created the derivatives pricing equation, a self-fulfilling prophecy that led more than indirectly to the financial crisis.
We heard about the inhibition schooled into our children that prevented from then writing freely, from the storyteller making it her business to shake them up a bit.
We heard about the post-war moment when a socialist-minded electorate created modern Britain only to have the narrative wrested from them by future governments.
These stories demonstrated that we identify more with the small and the specific way more than we do with the general and prescriptive. Life, in all its messy, complicated ways, is made up not of media owner narratives but of the stories that emerge from specific individuals, objects, times and places.
Edwyn Collins, who recovered from his stroke and re-built his identity and memories from scratch, only did so because he refused to listen to the doctors who told him there was no point.
Both Rob Manuel and Laura Dockrill, a kid’s writer and the day’s best speaker by a country mile, talked about a more democratic approach to creative expression. Right now we suffer from a top-down sickness, whether it’s Manuel’s elitist media owners, or Alice Lee’s analysis of children’s media – media that tell us more about the adults who made it than the children it was supposedly made for.
‘Commentards’, children, Occupy activists, Paralympic vloggers – given the opportunity, fascinating stories can and should come from anyone.
Somewhere between the Conway Hall and the O2 I learned that, as Greil Marcus said, drawing lines still matters.
Going up against power structures, like the animator who worked with Cartoon Network did, or Ken Loach does, or Occupy, is necessary if you don’t want your view, your story, to become completely assimilated. If you want to retain the faculty of adding whatever is special about yourself to your story.
And, crucially, if you still want something more to tell your audience.
I’ve tried while writing this to come up with the usual, what-this-means-for-us-in-advertising, finishing flourish.
But I’m not sure I can. We’re a very long way from what the Story represents, at least institutionally even if not intentionally.
In advertising, to reach people and tell our stories, we use the very media owners and power structures that The Story asks us to guard against. We try to convince people – who we call consumers and probably think of as children – that we do know best. When we say we want to hear ‘their story’ we don’t really mean it, except in a few, moderated cases.
We can’t do small, messy, or authentic very well.
We sponsor the Brits. Or, as I did, accept hospitality invites. We support the media power structures.
We are the top half of the internet.
On the tube I saw, briefly, a bunch of advertising that, in comparison to what I’d just heard and seen during the day at Conway Hall, seemed superficial, thin, obvious and clichéd.
But this means there is hope.
Brands that do find a way to celebrate the different, the small, the uncomfortable, the specific, and maybe even the inappropriate might start to stand out.
They might start to have something of life about them, rather than the scripted simulacrum that most advertising becomes, despite itself.
Then perhaps we might genuinely add whatever is special about them to a story that feels genuine and real.
A smart guy I know once told me something that made me laugh.
He’s very smart, if a little embittered.
You know, like media planners can be.
He said this about ad agencies:
Account people wish they were planners.
Planners wish they were creatives.
And creatives wish they were film directors.
We laughed because it seemed to sum something about the hierarchy ad agencies can sometimes be perceived to have.
But it also captured the (I think very healthy, actually) self-loathing that people in advertising have for their chosen discipline.
Or perhaps we should say, the discipline imposed upon them.
Because generally, a good media planner probably wants to think with levers bigger than just media.
An ad planner is striving for ideas that can and do live outside TV advertising.
A PR planner wants to think beyond media relations.
Really, at heart, everyone involved wants to make culture.
And brands and ideas are just the way that people in advertising are able to do it.
So I say, great.
We should all have an ambition to be – or have been – something else.
Because the cultural niche we’re trying to carve out for ourselves – within our team, organisation or client relationships – is what helps us bring something different, unique and subjective to the briefs we work on.
It’s what gives us our point of view.
Striving to be bigger, outside or beyond is our job.
The interests we pursue through choice are what help us when we’re constrained by the expectation of others.
Which is just a rubbish paraphrase of Wilde, really.
“What you read when you don’t have to determines what you’ll be when you can’t help it.”
It’s taken me far longer than usual to write up my response to Firestarters 7, and I don’t only mean getting around to it.
If this post has ended up a bit rambly, then it’s because I’ve trying to find a way through a bunch of thoughts that seem related (at least to me), but haven’t quite settled into a comfortable shape until now.
I’ve chunked it up to order my thoughts.
This is stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it’s useful to start back at Firestarters last Tuesday.
The premise
At Firestarters this week Kirby Ferguson told us that Everything Is A Remix.
Planners tend already to be either students or proponents of combinatorial creativity, so it maybe wasn’t that revelatory.
But Kirby’s story was wonderfully researched and beautifully rendered.
It was a warm bath of cultural references and a gently iconoclastic tug at that Romantic thread that stretches from Beethoven to Dylan to the modern-day ECD.
He believes that creativity is more a function of discovery than it is imagination, and can therefore be accessed by anyone.
New ideas are already contained within familiar ideas. They are revealed through an unending and exponential process of re-contextualisation, waiting to be chanced upon by those curious and insatiable enough to copy, transform or combine what already exists.
Kirby’s apparently throwaway phrase “talent is simply interest” seemed initially to encapsulate his position.
On reflection it has also been his most contentious statement.
I liked it at first. It was provocative. I’ve defended it on Twitter. But some very smart people have questioned it as an over-simplistic reduction and I’d be foolish to ignore them.
Because new ideas don’t just happen.
Creative people do need something other than a pre-disposition to smash disparate elements together in the hope of something new.
As an MEC colleague said to me afterwards, someone can be as interested as they like in becoming a singer, but without the talent it simply won’t happen.
And, as Phil has argued, there is more to idea creation than mere curiosity in things that already exist.
So, to concede the point formally, talent ISN’T just interest.
But perhaps, to flip the phrase, interest is actually a talent.
This feels to me like it has more value in achieving what Kirby wants to do – which is to elevate interest, not do down talent.
What do I mean?
Three reasons interest might be a talent
First, while creativity is a process which can be identified and described, taught and applied, I believe that interest (or curiosity) is more of an impulse, a behaviour.
It comes from within and is difficult to inculcate.
That could make it a talent, couldn’t it?
Second, interest has a qualitative side to it.
Some people are just better at it than others. They’re interested in more things, in more diverse areas.
We are all of us now curators and combiners of the world around us.
We are all natural remixers. We curate, combine and re-contextualise everything.
We curate our own music albums, TV schedules, photos and films.
We share, link to, pin, filter and tumble things we like, things we don’t like, things we want people to think we like.
We effectively curate our own lives for others through the way we represent it digitally.
And, to quote The Incredibles, if everyone’s special, then no-one is.
So if we’re going to do this stuff professionally then we’d better be better at it than everyone else.
Which is presumably what we mean when we look for people who are talented at spotting trends and patterns (as opposed to fads and stuff on our own doorstep).
Third, and most importantly, while it’s never been easier to catch hold of new and interesting stuff via the internet, the very abundance of information now places a premium on the variety and quality of stimulus that you choose to play with.
As the internet’s ‘filter bubble’ continues to exert its influence, it becomes ever hard to, in Maria Popova’s words,
leave room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are
Coincidentally, on Wednesday, the day after Firestarters, Radio 4 broadcast a lecture from Maria called The Architecture of Knowledge, on just this subject. The introduction hailed her as someone who can help guide us through a world where “everything’s available and nothing’s obvious.”
There’s a few useful comparison arguments to draw on.
While it feels like a default setting for most planners and creative types, curiosity – and the impulse to curate the world – requires commitment, inventiveness and something else innate, not particularly definable.
In fact, the line between creativity and what we might as well submit to calling ‘curatorship’ is becoming impossibly blurred.
In a key phrase, Maria says in her lecture that
the quality of our creative output depends on the breadth and diversity of those mental resources.
This requires what she calls ‘associative indexing’ – the meta-data of memory, information and stimulus of any kind that enters our realm.
She quotes Charles Eames, who said that “everything eventually connects” given time. (So Kirby’s Remix idea isn’t new – but then, he has his defence built-in.)
Eames said that what counts is the quality of connections.
And the convergence of knowledge across multiple domains.
So, curiosity feels like something we should celebrate.
But perhaps more precisely, we should celebrate the discernment and creativity with which people pursue their curiosity.
This is central to why flipping Kirby’s contentious phrase started to help me work out why I’d been so attracted to it.
First, I’ve realised I believe that taste matters. And it matters more than ever.
Second, most exploration and curatorship is largely pointless at the time we find things out, because the application of knowledge is largely unpredictable.
We don’t know when and why the most fruitful collisions of ideas will take place.
It’s a great irony, but in order to put knowledge to use, we have to spend our lives continually acquiring entirely useless knowledge.
That kind of vision beyond the immediate here and now is also something you could call talent.
Really? Who says? (Part 2)
Kirby used some musical examples at Firestarters. In thinking about this post I’ve been thinking again about the creativity in hip-hop and how it offers a fantastic model for what I’m talking about.
Hip-hop’s magpie mentality made for innovative music that existed entirely of re-contextualised recorded performances. Records are comprised not composed; lifetimes’ worth of listening with the snippets and shards of other people’s are re-imagined to make something new.
Paul’s Boutique. Three Feet High And Rising. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.
But more than that, hip-hop had built in its own ‘discernment curve’.
Because fresh sources of inspiration were imperative. Ever more esoteric and imaginative samples became re-contextualised. Interests that had originally had nothing to do with being a hip-hop fan became relevant, valuable.
Not for nothing was there an underground collective called Diggin’ In The Crates - that was the literal job in hand.
Influences became more disparate. The domains got more diverse.
Like Shaolin Kung-Fu philosophy, movie soundtracks, library music.
Or this, for example.
You”ll remember Sour Times by Portishead.
Well, now check out this piece of incidental music from the Mission Impossible TV series. It’s by Lalo Schiffrin. Listen to the first 10 seconds, and the five seconds that start at 1m 33s.
Sounds inevitable now, doesn’t it? But spotting the potential of those two breaks takes time, skill, recall and a breadth of soundtrack knowledge.
Of course, it requires the kind of creative ‘diagonal’ leap that Phil talks about.
But you have to be listening in the first place.
You have to listen to enough music, first of all, to know that using it would be ‘new’. You also need to listen to enough source music to know what will work and what won’t. Most of us think in relative terms, and artistic innovation is no different.
In short, it takes the sort of attention and interest you can only call talent.
Joining it together, sort of
Appropriately, the last question from the floor on Tuesday night was about an idea from Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. It came from Glyn.
(Digression: as a fellow Reynolds nut I introduced myself to Glyn immediately. It’s the sort of lovely serendipity for which I’ve come to cherish Firestarters.)
The question was about the diminishing quality of remixes in a culture where remixing has been made easy.
Joining the dots to all this, I went back to something Brian Eno said, quoted by Reynolds in Retromania. In a 1922 interview for Artforum, Eno said this:
“Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.”
This is Eno’s vision of the artist as “the connector of things”, analogous to “the editor, the compiler and the anthologist.”
The contemporary artist is someone who
“perpetuates a great body of received cultural and stylistic assumptions, he re-evaluates and re-introduces certain ideas no longer current, and then he also innovates.”
This is the line between curatorship and creativity blurred forever.
Does this mean that ‘diagonal’ thinking is less needed? No, of course not.
But the more self-conscious our remixing tendencies, the more judicious and discerning our connection points need to be.
We need to become connoisseurs at curating our chosen realm of culture.
In hip-hop/music terms, very few have been better at this than Massive Attack. Not for nothing did The Guardian recently call Blue Lines the blueprint of UK music.
And, of course, their own magpie brilliance makes them ripe for deeper engagement in the information age.
Because you can now hear directly where their inspiration came from, thanks to Spotify and other, ‘interested’ listeners.
In the week since I’ve become completely energised all over again by the license we have in his line of work to make our own future.
We can genuinely make something from nothing. In our work environment. For our clients. For ourselves.
We just have to have the right attitude.
We have to stop being so sensible.
In the book Grant talks about uncertainty, what ifs, experiments, trends.
And also what he calls the ‘innovation paradox’.
The paradox is this: we don’t yet know that we need what we will need.
We cannot predict the future. Therefore we cannot plan for it either.
Culture – and that means business, marketing, trends, priorities, stuff – is inscrutable. It is brought about through experiments. We probe the possible, often with very little idea of what will happen, or even what it means to do so.
This is Think Small writ large. It is Labs thinking with a playful edge.
It is improvisational. It is guesswork. And it makes things fun again…
So that was Wednesday morning.
Coincidentally, that evening, after work, my team had its first scheduled experiment with Powerpoint Karaoke.
You get 10 charts you’ve never seen before. And you use them to tell a story.
We had no real idea about what it would mean, or what this experiment was for.
Presentation training? Confidence building? Storytelling? Thinking on your feet?
It hadn’t been intended as anything so formalised as that, but afterwards someone described it as having felt like some kind of shared learning.
To me it was startling just how hard people fight to sustain a story.
Everyone had been nervous, but they embraced the trepidation to not only have fun, but also create spontaneous narratives in a way they simply don’t even think of when delivering most work ‘presentations’.
The stories we utter nonsense, of course.
But it felt like something.
The parallels with Grant’s talk were obvious, and some us are thinking about where the experiment might go.
More of the same? A wider group? Publishing the presentations?
We took notes of everyone’s reflections the following day, so we could capture the mood.
But the stories themselves remain fragile. And that feels like part of the charm. We don’t want to kill this thing by affording it too much significance.
We want to keep it as a thing, not the thing…
Because that’s been the real lesson for me since Wednesday.
A liberating sense of trying something out in the moment, rather than obsessing over what it’s supposed to achieve.
This is the Culturematic credo. Do things because they feel interesting. Avoid strategising each development.
But also trying lots of things has begun to feel exciting again.
I’ve realised I need more projects on the go.
Lots of bets.
Because we innovate the things we will need by playing with what we have now…
All this was Wednesday.
Then on Friday I went to Playful for the first time.
It’s by DH Lawrence. I’d put it away in my mind as frivolous, perhaps not in keeping with the serious nature of what I thought rocknroll should do.
Serious overthrow of the establishment. Not getting fooled again. All that sort of stuff.
But it makes a lot of sense right now. So I thought I’d share it.
A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.
Don’t do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don’t do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don’t do it for equality,
do it because we’ve got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don’t do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let’s abolish labour, let’s have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it’s not labour.
Let’s have it so! Let’s make a revolution for fun!
I found some notes the other day. They were taken when I’d been reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.
The passage did strike me at the time.
The male narrator gives an intoxicating description of the moment he realises what possessions can mean to us.
It begins with a recollection of a gift given recently.
From there it blossoms into a very poetic take on how objects become imbued with a magical, emotional quality.
They come to stand for something far bigger and yet far more personal than the mere material from which the object is made.
A good reminder that people’s attachment to things is deep, subtle and complex.
“I gave her a new purse of red lacquered leather. As a matter of fact, she laughed at me over the red purse. It was charming, but a bargain, and no longer in fashion.
In these matters, about which up to that time I was as little learned as in any language of the Eskimoes, I learned a great deal from Maria.
Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain.
They were, on the contrary, a little, or rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many-sided, containing a multiplicity of things, all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing shoe, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag.
This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battery.”
I’ve just this morning dropped my son off at pre-school nursery.
It was a big day for him, his first at the school where his big brother goes. For the first few days parents normally hang around a bit so the kids cab get used to the place, and the situation.
Today I watched him flit about the tables. He would briefly pick something up, pronounce something to me or his mum, then move on.
He was taking it all in. Getting the measure of the situation by touching, interpreting, and assimilating as many things as possible.
He was playing.
He soon gravitated towards the ‘home corner’. Here he went deeper. The imaginative play became more prolonged. The scenarios became more thought-out.
He made himself at home.
The notion of ‘learning through play’ is widely discussed these days. It breeds confidence. The effort/reward dynamic is a productive one. We find new realms of activity we wouldn’t otherwise if we stuck to rigid rules.
But in advertising we seem to discuss it largely in terms of brands and communications.
How we can gamify a campaign. How we can incentivise people. How we can make an experience ‘social.’
The benefits of play are not something we formalise enough for ourselves very often.
I think we could make more of the ‘play ethic‘ in our industry - defined as it is by creativity, learning about what’s possible, and assimilating new ways of doing things.
Imagine if instead of a to-do list we started off everyday like my son did this morning: just exploring some new stimulus
Or if instead of ‘learning the ropes’, the beginning of our career was marked with a similar period of exploring the different corners of the business.
Where we discovered what we were good at and what made us feel good.
Where our imagination was the main criterion and we were judged on what unimagined opportunity we could invent.
Not which existing mold we fitted best.
When I went to the Bauhaus exhibition a few weeks ago I saw how a philosophical commitment to play can foster creativity exponentially.
(This isn’t as esoteric a segue as it appears. The Bauhaus ultimately included advertising as one of its core disciplines.)
Looking back today through the notes I made, the theme of play and exploration clearly emerge.
One tutor, Josef Albers, encouraged the approach of ‘purposeful play’. Students would be encouraged to experiment with simple materials to “explore their inherent functional and constructive possibilites without stated practical aims”.
Understanding the different characteristics and qualities of wood, paper, fabric and glass developed wide-ranging creative skills that students could apply to their chosen vocation.
Assignments often fused art and play. Many of the major artists who taught at the Bauhaus had children themselves, so one year the students produced toys like this.
Ultimately this is about allowing people to tap into their creative imagination. Play lets us do that.
The tutor said: ” I struck a blow to the old tradition of the nude and drawing from nature, and I am leading all creative activity back to its roots, to play.”
The word that I remember most from the exhibit – one of those composite abstract nouns that only the Germans have – was Gesamtkunstwerk.
It means ‘total art work’.
You approach life as you would art. And vice versa.
I think if we want advertising to remain an exciting, vibrant and creatively fulfilling realm in the future we need to encourage more of its proponents to think like this.
That everything is material.
Looking around me at work I see young professionals 15 years younger than me working and communicating largely with powerpoint (or keynote, of course).
This depresses me, not because I’m anti-powerpoint (I know it’s unfashionable, but I actually think ppt has had an amazing democratising effect on people’s capability to express ideas in public).
It depresses me because anything so widely used leads to homogenous results.
It reflects badly on us.
It means we’ve shown generation upon generation of new thinkers that in our industry that
a) there is a way to do things, and
b) that way is exactly the same as every other sector in business.
I’d like to think that as experts in communication we wouldn’t always default to the same mode.
We have a world of different materials at our disposal.
Appropriately enough, later in the morning we had a great discussion trying to articulate the way conversations spread between children and parents, between school and the home.
Last year my wife’s anniversary present to me was a writing course. The title was ‘Persuasive Writing’.
Demonstrating the continuing empathy that causes female colleagues of mine to tilt their head to one side in appreciation, she had thought it would be useful for my work, and for this blog.
And it was. Trying out different modes of writing taught me a lot. There’s a lot to be said for being set exercises you wouldn’t normally try.
We examined speechwriting. We experimented with horror stories to create fear. We looked at structure and style, and dfferent reasons for writing. It was fantastic, and helped me realise just how quickly you can create a world, and how careful you need to be to sustain it.
And it started with one of the best ice-breaking exercises I’ve ever done.
In pairs, each of us shared our five-minute potted history, which the other wrote up in one of two styles we’d just looked at as a group. We then read out to the class each effort at parody, to much amusement.
My partner had to tell my back story a la Mills & Boon. I got Raymond Chandler.
Now I love Chandler. I’ve read quite a bit, normally on sunny and relaxing holidays in Italy. There’s something heatsoaked laidback and sunbeaten about both the prose and the setting that just fits.
And there’s something about having children that has made this kind of synesthetic indulgence nigh on impossible in recent years.
Somehow, though, this year I managed to read a couple of novels. I am very pleased about this. The children notwithstanding this is no mean feat for me these days.
The books both had for me a Chandler connection. James M Cain is in the same noir firmament as Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and his telling of Mildred Pierce’s saga had the same dry wit and ironic Californian eye as Marlowe.
Year by year I’m realising I love McCarthy’s books. If James Ellroy took Chandler’s ‘hard-boiled’ ethos to the extreme, McCarthy took the sparse story-telling nous and spliced it with the western to create something wonderful.
It’s like he’s trimmed off about 90% of what he could’ve said. It’s all plot-driven too – the focus is on things that happen, not mood or emotion.
At first you’d be hard pushed to describe the characters you’re reading about. You can feel their shape but not who they are.
As a narrative tactic it’s risky. Very little is explained. You don’t get told what people look like, even. The people feel like stereotypes. But what at first leaves you feeling left out slowly draws you in.
The more you read the more you know these people. Cut-outs become flesh. You realise the words on the page are like precipitate – they’re what’s left when these lives have been boiled down to their essence. The writing contains everything, but it’s the reader that fills in the gaps.
It’s what McCarthy chooses to leave in and leave out that is the key.
You’re only told what the characters do and say. Not what they think or feel.
There’s almost no interior monologue. You have to inuit motivation. What people have done makes them who they are.
McCarthy is interested in deed and action, not thoughts and feelings.
Because deed is where the insight lies. Deed is where people reveal their genuine character.
As I return to work from holiday I always want to retain something as I re-enter and acclimatise.
Alongside the usual stuff this year I shall also be trying to keep McCarthy with me.
I won’t be re-creating that ice-breaker exercise. I’m not going to start posting in pastiche.
But I am going to try to think a bit more like him when dealing with clients, colleagues, audiences.
I’ll try not to confuse over-explanation with persuasion. I will try to tell stories in ways that let an audience fill in the gaps. Focus on simple and specific description and avoid the easy but unhelpful conceptualising we planners are often guilty of.
But more than that, I’d like to emulate his almost ideological obsession with what people do. I’ll try to be more disciplined. Researching not what people say, but how they live their lives. Mining insight about values and intent and fears and loves from the way people respond to events and other people around them.
Not what they tell us in focus groups and quant studies.
This means thinking like someone who’s job it is to represent the actions of people in made-up situations in ways that seem credible and truthful. Like a novelist. Observing, meeting, watching, studying. Writing down what you see so you don’t forget. Keeping a log of behaviour and actions and reactions so that one day it becomes a useful reference point. Understanding the specific actions that happen around a service or a place or a product and working out how to create, minimise or bypass them.
Maybe then it won’t just be the writing that becomes more persuasive.
