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Popular vs. Cool - The Barry Manilow Effect

I don't know if Barry Manilow has ever been cool.  Popular, yes, but cool...don't think so.  Cool and popular aren't always the same, though it's a known fact that Elvis embodies both.  Cool usually precedes popular.  In fact, popular is usually achieved via cool.  Popular doesn't preclude cool (as illustrated with Elvis, Steven Tyler, Keith Richards, and several others), but too often, popular has the ability to flip some kind of switch that makes every last trace of cool go away. I call this theory: The Barry Manilow Effect.

Exhibit A: Paul McCartney.  He was cool as a Beatle.  Not as cool as John Lennon, but still, pretty cool.  Then he turned into Barry Manilow.  Sad. 

Exhibit B: Sting. The Police?  Cool, in the coolest way.  Sting now?  Barry Manilow.

Exhibit C:  The Spinal Tap jazz phase.

The switch that popular flips, I think, is the one that controls self-indulgence.  When you get to thinking that the stuff you do is really, really cool (and that feeling is backed up by a significant following), it's easy to get self indulgent, and think ANYTHING you do will continue to be cool.  It happens in music, and movies.  And it happens with agencies. 

You forget what it was, exactly, that made your stuff cool in the first place.  Or maybe you don't forget.  Maybe you never really knew the essence of it.  Because it's usually not a style or a look that makes your stuff cool, so much as it is an attitude, or a worldview, or a willingness to take chances to lead (or at least keep up with) a fickle audience. 

Something to think about while the calendar changes.

Have a really cool New Year.

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What are they thinking?

Here's a post I wrote for the BBDigital Blog.

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New Definitions: Crazy.

Getting ready to make the drive to Florida.  Talking about how to make the drive go faster.  One of the rejected ideas, because it wasn't real in the first place -- but it was funny -- was to do the crazy astronaut thing, and have everybody wear diapers in the car.  Remember the crazy astronaut?  The one who drove from Houston to Florida to settle the score on a love triangle? 

In the dictionary, next to the word "Crazy," you'll find her picture.  Except, not really.  And not anymore.

We couldn't remember her name.  Two people Googled. 
Enter: "nasa, murder."  She's number 6.
But if you enter: "crazy astronaut," Lisa Marie Nowak is number 1.

Lesson:  On the web, information and entertainment are intertwined.  Information leads the way. It helps (a lot) to think about the mindset of your audience at the very moment they might be looking for information you'd like them to have, regardless of whether that information is entertaining. To some (many) traditional creatives, it means creating for the web  -- if it's anything other than a gigantic flash site full of made-for-web branded films -- is inherently and decidedly un-creative and boring. 

But, that's just crazy.

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'Tis the Season

It's that time of year again.  Making lists, checking them twice.  Wondering if you'll have everything packaged and ready in time.  Going over your budget once again, because once again, you've managed to spend more than you planned.  Knowing some people will be joyous -- others disappointed.  Addressing, labeling, and frantically scurrying to make all the deliveries on time.

Of course, I'm talking about...Advertising Awards Season.  Pretty much everything but CA and Cannes is due, like, now.  Insanity reigns.

Let me disclose right away:  I am staunchly ambivalent toward advertising awards.  I have been through phases of my career during which I loved awards as much or more than doing the work itself, and yes, have been a self-proclaimed awards whore, with a shelf-load of most of the best ones to show for it. I am still perversely proud of the fact that a piece I did many years ago was the first our Atlanta office, before they were our Atlanta office, ever got into the One Show.  Conversely, I have been through phases during which you couldn't get me to go, at gunpoint, into an awards presentation, regardless of my chances of winning.  Interestingly, neither of those periods correspond to either a drought or a flood, in terms of awards won on my, my production company's, or my agency's part.  After struggling with competing emotions for many years, I finally decided to embrace my ambivalence.

No industry lavishes more awards on itself than does ours.  Movies and music don't even come close.  Which, one would think, would devalue awards.  And for some awards, that is, in fact, the case.  Walk into any agency anywhere and you're sure to find a prominently placed table or shelves, overflowing with statues and obelisks of gold, silver, bronze, glass, and plexi.  You might recognize the names of some, but others will be decidedly obscure.  Still, there are some awards that have clearly retained their -- albeit fleeting -- star-making, buzz-making, press-and-client-prospect head-turning value, despite the overcrowding.  Some awards are simply worth more.  That still doesn't make me love or hate them any differently.  But it does have an effect on where I put the entry budget.

To further explain my ambivalence, here's a snippet of something I wrote about awards quite some time ago, in a numbered list of 10 Things I've Learned in my career:

7. Brands count – even in award shows. This explains why a just-ok spot with a Swoosh logo on it will pretty much always get in CA, but a spectacular spot for Ed’s R/V Center probably won’t. As advertising people, we’re supposed to be immune to brand worship, because we’re the ones who create it. But actually, advertising people worship brands more than anyone else. And award show judges are simply advertising people who’ve reached the status of advertising god.

8. Award show judges are not advertising gods. Awards are great. Spectacular, even. Almost nothing else has a fifty-fifty shot to: A – make you think you’re worth twice your salary, or B – make you think your career is over. But remember: Award show judges are there because they couldn’t get somebody better. And in advertising, no matter how good you are, there’s always somebody better. I’ve judged award shows. Enough said.

Awards have value because awards create press and buzz.  But press and buzz help you win awards.  Get noticed, the judges notice.  Judges notice, the press notices, and you get the private side meeting before the RFP. Or so the theory goes.  It's complicated.

And now to complicate things further, things are getting further complicated.  There was a time when one could open an awards book, and you knew what to expect, based on the year emblazoned on the cover.  The cleverest headline twists combined with the cleverest visual selections, designed in the in-vogue style of the year (sometimes broken out by geography) denoted the good print stuff.  Basically, the funniest TV pretty much had its way.  But now, as I wrote last week, there are more definitions of good.  And more places to look for it.

With the ad world all abuzz about a cyber entry winning a traditionally traditional Cannes, who knows what to expect?  Of course, the cyber entry in question, the Dove film, is, while undeniably and unbelievably good, about as close to traditional advertising in form as anything cyber could be.  It's simply an extraordinarily well-concepted, well-made piece of video that happened to be delivered online.  Which means any panel of judges, regardless of their digital-world knowledge, would score it high.  But what about stuff that works incredibly well for digital, but maybe not in other forms?  Depends on who's judging.  The immediate answer from the traditionalists might be that to be great, a piece has to work in any form.  I completely disagree.  Subservient Chicken simply won't make a good outdoor board.  And most radio spots don't make great print ads.  That's why there are categories. Which helps.  Kinda.

People don't consume advertising and other kinds of marketing messages in neat categorized chunks.  They consume it in that gigantic ever-churning mixing bowl called daily life.  What matters to people (and ultimately to your client) is that whatever it is that you've put out there moves them in some (hopefully intended) way.  Period. Many (probably most) award-winning pieces do just that.  But then, so do some pieces that have never, and will never, hold a statue.

No actual person who's not in advertising ever looks at an ad and thinks, "Dang, that's the best four-color, full-page, regional/national, consumer products (health and beauty) ad I've ever seen."  It just doesn't happen. People like the ad, or the spot or the site, or they don't - compared to, well, compared to whatever else was competing for their attention at any given time. Awards are a way to measure how much one group of people (the specific judges judging your work) like your work at a given point in time.

My ambivalent bottom line on awards?  Necessary, inasmuch as gaining ground in an industry that covets awards requires you to win as many as possible, as often as possible.  Fun when you win.  Instructive, win or lose.  Meaningful, only like most of the stuff we make -- which is to say, yes, very.  But only until next year.  In essence, they're simultaneously meaningless and incredibly important.

Which means, by all means, enter.  Enter with vigor.  And take your winnings with well deserved, honest pride. And, also, with a grain of salt.

Season's Greetings.

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Some will get it. Some won't. Ad Infinitum.

I write a lot about keeping up, realizing it's going to be harder for some than it is for others.  Given how long I've been at this (making stuff that's supposed to persuade people, loosely defined as advertising) I'm pretty amazed that I've been able to keep up as much as I have.  It's hard work.  But for a creative, or a creative director, or an agency, or a client, it's now more a part of your job than it's ever been.

The revolution that we're living in right now, although much bigger and much more significant, sometimes sort of reminds me of the first creative revolution I lived through in my career.  Heralded by the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," that first one had to do with the structure of TV spots, and what kinds and styles of footage were acceptable, and in vogue, for those spots.  With the introduction of music video as a legitimate format, specific elements from music videos (quick cuts, flash frames, distressed film, nonlinear, vignette-driven quasi-storytelling) slowly started making their way into the spot world.  We went through a period where every spot out there looked like a music video.  The fashion eventually faded, but some of the techniques found their way to a permanent place in the spot maker's toolbox, to be used from time to time, when appropriate.  From 2007, it's easy to look back and think it all happened really quickly.  Videos emerged, and suddenly everybody did video-like spots.  It didn't happen that way.  (And if you're young enough to think that stuff has always been at least a part of the spot-making toolbox you're way off.)  Clients were afraid of the style.  Agencies were afraid of the style. Directors and editors were afraid, too. 

I remember a pretty famous, very well-established editor making fun of the fact that, on one particular job, I wanted to underexpose, then push the film two stops to grain it up.  "Why not just unroll the negative, and drag it behind your car?" was his response.  I just smiled, and put in my lab order.  I wasn't going to drag it behind the car.  Besides, I drove a truck.  But I did file the idea away, and later, actually took sandpaper to a different negative, on another job.  That editor, and I'm assuming, most of the people he had worked with over the years, didn't get the whole idea of scratching your film, or cutting in 3-frame shots in a montage that only kind of told a story.  But the consumers that style was directed toward, the teens and twenty-somethings of the late 80s and early 90s, completely got it.  It spoke to them, they responded, it sold a bunch of stuff, and after awhile I was being asked to do most of that stuff on every job.  Of course, by then, all those specific techniques were becoming passe.  But lots of agencies have a way of waiting until everybody else defines cool for them before they jump on the cool bandwagon.  Unfortunately, most of the time, it's too late.

The revolution music video style ushered in isn't the "music video style" revolution, though.  It's the idea-that-a-spot-can-look-like-anything-that's-appropriate-to-the-concept-and-the-audience revolution.  Video style cracked that door open, and all kinds of evolving film and video techniques rushed in -- and now spot filmmaking is about as diverse as filmmaking (videomaking) gets.  Didn't used to be -- way, way back in The Before Time, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth with Arri III's. (Disclosure: there's an Arri III on my left arm.)

Which brings me to now, and the revolution all of advertising and communications is living through, with varying degrees of success.  Creative style went through another door called the Web, and when it did, it fragmented, and shot off into a bajillion diverse trajectories, and, unbelievable to some, yes, every single one of them is legitimate -- for the right audience, at the right moment.  Because the web allows for what used to be only mass technique to become niche, the things that define good style are almost incalculably diverse.  With the diversity comes cross-pollination, and pretty soon weird stuff you never thought you'd ever see is heralded as the next new big thing.  Like controllable guys in chicken suits, and stuff like that.  What matters now isn't so much that something conforms to predetermined visions of what used to define good.  What matters now is whether something resonates.  Good, of course, helps things resonate.  But good is now defined a lot of different ways.

Does that mean anything goes?  I don't think so.  I think it means more and more of your stuff is going to resonate for some, and not for others.  It's always been that way, but now it's going to be that way a whole lot more, and now, that's ok, as long as it resonates for the people you want it to work for.  Some will get it.  Some won't.  That's now the rule, rather than the exception.

In my last post I wrote that, today, I'd write a bit of an analysis of the World AIDS Day Video we released last week.  I just did that -- albeit on a much more theoretical level than I'd planned.  I thought about explaining all the ideas for backgrounds and transitions we had to give the piece much more multi-view watchability -- but couldn't afford, on a budget of $0, and a concept-through-production schedule of 1.5 days.  I thought about talking at length about how leaving comments open invited negativity, yet boosted views, and thus, reach.  But anyone who understands YouTube understands that.  And I thought about talking about length, and how, even though it's tedious, it forces an emotional connection with the numbers in the initial view, and was designed in to help it resonate.  It wasn't meant to be a TV spot, so it wasn't made like one.  With money and time, I might have made some things differently, but the idea is the thing that, ultimately, makes something resonate, and (IMHO) the idea did just that. In the week it's been up, I've had a very few people (less than 10) tell me they didn't get it.  But with what's approaching 400,000 views in that same first week, I'm convinced quite a few more people did.

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Old vs. New

Seth just re-posted something he wrote seven years ago.  It's about media corporations, but if you're smart, and you can read figuratively, a lot of the points he makes apply to the way advertising is/was made, too.  It's worth a read for anyone who makes anything with the goal of getting the right people to notice and act.  On that note, this weekend I'm hoping to write a bit of an analysis and some gut thoughts about how things happened with the World AIDS Day video, which now has over 350,000 views (in one week), and is still gaining.

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