Consumers aren't stupid

A staring contest, earlier today


For those unfamiliar with the Herald Sun, perhaps the best way to get a feel for the type of paper it is is via its nickname, the "Herald Scum", or "The Scum" for short.

The chief reason for this moniker is, i think, not so much its unrelenting right-wing bias (a characteristic of all News Corp media organs, including The Australian, which engenders nothing like the same disgust) but its undisguised contempt for its readership.

Unlike The Oz, the Scum doesn't make even the faintest of nods in the direction of journalistic objectivity or balance. The paper doesn't so much blur the line between editorial and news as it does take an exact note of the line's location and dimensions, carefully paint over them with a thick slime of xenophobia, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and anti-union sentiment and stand gloating beside them, smug in the assumption that its readership will be too stupid to notice. No story is too complex to oversimplify, no adjective too blatantly biased to employ.

Yet for all its misguided "i-mentioned-the-war-once-or-twice-but-i-think-i-got-away-with-it" arrogance about its readers' inability to detect its agendas, on Thursday the Scum credited them with greater cognitive ability than most marketers ever will.

In order to try and steal some of the centre ground back from ascendant Labour Leader Kevin Rudd, PM John Howard had suggested that he would mitigate one of the more doctrinaire clauses in the new Workchoices legislation.

The Scum led with a two-word headline:

PM BLINKS

On the face of it, it's a pretty simple headline. But it in fact demands the reader to bring a great deal of information with them in order to make sense of it.

First of all, the reader has to get the analogy between an electoral race and a staring contest. It's not a particularly obvious connection because, taken on its own, it's not a particularly relevant metaphor (Howard's not really backing down to Rudd, per se).

In order to completely get it, you have to be familiar with the history of that metaphor's use. Ideally, you have to know that, almost forty five years ago at the resolution of a nuclear standoff between the USA and the USSR, someone at the higher levels of the US government (i've seen the quote variously attributed to JFK, RFK and Secretary of State Dean Rusk) described the Russian backdown thus: "we were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked".

That's some fairly obscure knowledge to assume of a mass audience.* No marketer I've ever met would do it.

And that raises the question: are we,as a profession, more patronising than the Herald Sun?


*You probably don't actually have to know the whole story, but you do have to be familiar with the reference as it has translated in pop culture, as in, for example, the title of former Pepsi CEO Roger Enrico's book about the cola wars.

Overheard today...

Two designers arguing quietly, respectfully, but with undeniable passion, over whether or not to turn over the word "is" in a subhead on a DL brochure.

And I think that's fantastic.

Because, either way the cards fall, nobody else is ever going to notice. Not the suit. Not the client. Not the consumer.

They're not going to win acclaim or promotion for caring about such details. In fact, far from being incentivised to care about such things, they're disincentivised (apologies if that's not actually a word). They're wasting good billable hours.

But care they do. And working with people who care about Getting It Right for its own sake is, to my mind, one of the best things about the industry.

An ad waiting to happen...

I was going to keep this one to myself, but on reflection it's too brilliant not to share:

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table


MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.

MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.

FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

MOM: Now everything is fine.

DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

MOM: There was a big sex.

FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

(Everybody laughs.)

MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?

ALL: Yes.

GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

From a recent New Yorker. Full article here.

Hypodermic model still sucks

Being always slightly behind the zeitgeist, I've only just gotten around to picking up Freakonomics.

So far there's one passage that delights me particularly. The authors give a list of ten words often used in real estate ads and ask the reader to pick which correlate with higher sale prices and which with lower:

Fantastic
Granite
Spacious
State-of-the-art
!
Corian
Charming
Maple
Great neighbourhood
Gourmet

Unsurprisingly, the list breaks down as follows:

Terms correlated to higher sale price
Granite
State-of-the-art
Corian
Maple
Gourmet


Terms correlated to a lower sale price
Fantastic
Spacious
!
Charming
Great neighbourhood

Admittedly, the authors have a much more sophisticated explanation, but what's important to me is that those terms that convey concrete information (granite, corian, maple) sell, while those that simply assert virtue (fantastic, charming, the dreaded screamer) either do nothing or actively work against the sale, because consumers assume that if you actually had something persuasive to say, you'd be saying it.

Copywriting may not be poetry, but its nice to see the two needn't be entirely antithetical.

Remarkable new planning model

Planners? Beg the question? Never!

Vale Kurt

The conceit that gave birth to at least a dozen TVCs, scores of music videos and very probably Martin Amis's magnificent "Time's Arrow":

"The formation then flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks.

"The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new.

"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel containers were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mostly women who did this work.

"The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

Arguably, it's still at its most potent in the original.

Together Everyone Achieves More?

My AD's been away a bit recently, so I've ended up working with a few freelancers.

Although I couldn't say I've really "clicked" with any of them, it's been an interesting experience and it's got me thinking about exactly what the role of the creative department is.

My partner and I, and most of the other teams here, are very "clean" thinkers. If (and it's a big if) we agree that the SMP is right, we'll rarely present work that deviates from it. We constantly ask ourselves "is this persuasive?", "is it compelling?" as well as "is this novel?" and "is this interesting?"

A couple of the guys I've been working with are much looser/ less precise in their thinking. Their only yardstick is whether it's creative and/or interesting. It doesn't really matter to them whether the work makes a convincing case.

And maybe that's alright. Maybe it's a good thing.

Although they come up with a lot of ideas I would consider irrelevant, they also come up with a couple I wouldn't have thought of.

Yes, on the face of it it seems to make sense that everybody on a job ought to be pulling in the same direction. But there are perils in that approach. It's how you get group think, how dodgy reasoning becomes dogma.

It's how you end up internalising the client's rules and a priori assumptions.

So maybe it makes more sense if we concieve of different departments as working adversarially, or at least as working to achieve different goals.

So our job is to make things interesting, planning checks if they're effective, account service makes sure they're practical. The tension between those different concerns produces the best result.

I'm not sure what I think.

On one hand, my gut feeling is that anything that stops self censorship and removes creative fetters must be good.

On the other, I quite enjoy the "strategic" side of the job. The thought of abdicating it makes me feel a little more like the "monkey at a typewriter" - a random idea generator.

I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.