Miranda Writes

So i've been kinda obsessing about digital at the moment. The spec spec slots in my book are full of all sorts of pieces that aim to fully exploit the possibilities of the medium and show how young and hip I am.

And yet the best piece of digital I've come across recently has not even the vaguest whiff of 2.0 about it.

In fact, techologically, it could have been made ten years ago, maybe even fifteen.

Tellingly, it's not been done by an agency. I doubt it could have been; it relies too heavily on tone of voice, which is one of the hardest things to protect from the 250 people client side who want to "add some value".

It's by this woman, Miranda July.

There's clearly no need for a picture here; I'm just adding it 'cos I have a crush

Best of all, it works. I found the site on a Thursday, went back to it a couple of times on Friday, and bought the book on Saturday.

Here's the site.

Research results - Guinness/ Artois

Sample size:
1

Methodology:
To avoid observer effect, subject was unaware she was participating in research. She was studied while sitting in her own home on her sofa, watching television. To avoid arousing suspicion, researcher posed as her long-term partner.

Stimulus 1: Guinness Cog

Subject was exposed to Guinness ad in premier spot during "Californication". She was either unaware of preceding hype or unmoved by such.

After observing between 5 and 6 seconds of advertisement, subject's attention turned to article on Amy Winehouse in gossip magazine.

When questioned about Guinness ad at conclusion of commercial break, subject denied that one had been aired. In the face of subject's superior skills of reason and argument, researcher was forced to acknowledge that said spot could not possibly have aired. (Subject has tutored logic at a tertiary level. She can build a Turing Machine; if he's perfectly honest, researcher doesn't quite understand what one is)

Stimulus 2: Artois- Pass it on

Subject seemed to be focused on this ad for about the first 10-12 seconds. She then began to relate a story about something that happened at work that day. When researcher attempted to draw her attention back to the TV, as he was quite curious to see the ad, he was immediately silenced so story could continue.

Recommendations

Perhaps consider introducing Amy Winehouse into Guinness ad?

Make "Pass it on" interactive by including a url where people can pass on their work stories. Either that or add more monkeys (subject likes monkeys).

Post Script:

Although the £10 million Guinness spot (which researcher, for the record, rather likes) failed to engage subject's attention, the much lower-budget ten second spot that followed it did raise a couple of chuckles. And that's all you can ask for really.

Evidence against me

Number 378(b) of the quixotic positions I constantly take with account people, clients and even occassionally creative directors is that people aren't stupid.

Sometimes they may be ignorant - they may, for example, not get my hip pop-culture references. But all of our spheres of knowledge are limited. Joe and Betty Barbecue probably know a shitload more about V8s and football than I do. It's just that, for fairly arbitrary reasons, some spheres have higher value placed on them than others.

Likewise, they may be busy or distracted, and so attending to my lovingly crafted 30 second spot with less than their full attention. That doesn't mean that, if I do manage to do something that engages them, they can't bring fairly sophisticated interpretive and reasoning skills to bear.

I'm fairly confident I'm right about this. And having grown up in a working class neighbourhood myself, I've seen how badly it can misfire when some halfwit private school boy with a bad BCom decides to run a piece that patronises ordinary, working people.

But occassionally, I see something that challenges my faith.

Like this piece from the manchester evening news, detailing how a scratch card has had to be withdrawn because punters had difficulty understanding negative numbers.

This hurts

It's true, it's kinda funny, but what interests me is that whoever made it felt compelled to express their gag in ad form.

I'm guessing it wasn't done by someone in the industry (it's not single-minded enough. While there's nothing wrong with the wrinkle on the Adidas tagline, it's a seperate thought that doesn't really gel with the main one. Plus there's too much information in the headline).

So why did they feel the need to construct a simple gag as an adidas ad?

I think it's one of two things.

Either the languge of print and poster advertising has become so pervasive that it's the first thing people think of when confronted with a task that involves combining images with the written word.

Or there's something immutable and eternal about the principles of communication generations of writers and art directors have evolved to tell a story.

I'm quite tickled by the latter idea.

Perhaps anyone, anywhere, would formulate a set of principles of communication similar to those we employ. I'm not talking about content here - just things like what function a headline or a subhead serves, how relative weights between the elements affect the overall meaning, how the same headline can mean different things depending upon where it's placed in the layout and so on.

And it makes me think: this really is a fabulous language we have here - it's economical, flexible and, at its best, capable of conveying things no other medium could. So why is it not more widely used to communicate things other than commercial messages?

Yet another argument in favour of simplicity

I've mentioned my dislike for the tabloids before. To be honest I've always stuggled to understand what anyone sees in them.

But recently, over a rainfilled weekend in Glasgow spent in their exclusive company, something clicked:

Tabloids prosper because they make the world simple, and people find that comforting.

Violent crime up? Longer sentences will fix it.

Heroin use rising? Addicts just need to learn a little willpower.

Scared of terroritsts? Sheer military force can fix it!

These are all issues that, if you look into them at all, become frighteningly complex.

Take crime for example: so many factors feed into it, and we really know so little about how to stop it that the more you think about it the more helpless the situation looks (the one thing that criminologists tend to agree upon is that the deterrent value of longer sentences is negligible - "If i was only going to get six years for assaulting this guy, I'd do it. But now it's ten i think I'll just have a cup of tea instead").

By lending their editorial weight to an easy answer, the tabloids make it respectable not to ask those questions. They take a load off your mind.

How does this relate to advertising? Well, I don't think it's too much of a long bow to draw to suggest that simple arguments are not just more effective because they are easier to take in, but that simplicity actually makes an argument more attractive.

In an advertising context, it's probably most relevant as support for the idea that we should say one thing and say it well. Additional points - say, ten other reasons why your soap powder is great, aside from the fact that it makes your clothes whiter - run the risk of opening up additional lines of enquiry for the consumer, factors : Is it environmentally friendly? Is it concentrated enough? Is it gentle on synthetics?

Each of these factors demands to be weighed against the others. To a particularly conscientious shopper, each even demands to be weighed against compeitor products.

And if I can't be bothered engaging in that sort of mental effort for the big issues, why would do it for you?

This is still a going concern

If anybody still occasionally takes the trouble to to pop over here and check if i've updated, i apologise for my recent prolonged silence. I've been on holiday in Croatia for a month trying (and failing) not to think about advertising. Before that i was all of a fluster getting ready to emigrate to London. I arrived on Saturday.

Normally people's travel tales are tooth-grindingly boring, so I'll try and keep Croatia-related content to a minimum, but it did give rise to a few new new thoughts on commuuncation and advertising.

For instance, when we arrived we recieved SMSs from T Mobile, asking us if we wanted daily weather forecast texted to us free each evening.

I presume this was supposed to be, at least in part, a marketing exercise for T Mobile. If that's the case, it failed spectacularly. The forecasts sometimes skipped a day, sometimes arrived two or three at a time. We were signed out of the service two or three times each, and asked to reapply several times - even when we were still recieving forecsts. All in all, it made T Mobile look like a pack of hacks.

On the other hand, if the Croatian tourist board wasn't involved, then it ought to have been. Every forecast was so alike, it became almost a standing joke between my girlfriend and me: Mostly Fine, Minimum 19, maximum 32, sea temperature 23.

Limited utility as a weather forecast, really, because you already knew what to expect, but a brilliant reinforcement of the county's reputation for beautiful weather.

So in essence, every evening I recieved a text (probably the only one i'd recieved that day), encouraging me to reflect on what a good time i was having.

Pretty good post-purchase reinforcement.

The emotional sell

As a viewer/ reader of advertising, I find that, despite our best (or worst) intentions, very little of it is genuinely emotionally affecting.

That's not surprising - you know that advertisers are deliberately setting out to manipulate you for their own ends, and that puts up some fairly high wall. Generally, only the most sincere and thought-provoking ads can surmount them.

Often, it's big budget ads with lush visuals and immaculate sound-design that manage to do it.

But the other night I was late back at work, trying desperately to find something to distract me from the fact that it was the third night in a row I'd eaten pizza, when my eye chanced upon this:



It kinda hit me in the guts. It's the back page of a Rivers catalogue (Rivers is a bottom-end-of-the-market clothing store that specialises in rural-style clothing). It's ostensibly trying to recruit retail assistants. But the top testimonial, the one about 65 year old guy with the downs syndrome son, is what makes me feel good about Rivers.

He started work there in 2002, when he would have been about 60. There aren't many places that would hire an unskilled 60-year-old. And anyone who's known somebody over 50 who's lost their job and can't get another knows just how devastating that can be.

But maybe the reason it works so well as a piece of communication is simply that it looks inadvertant - I suspect they weren't actually setting out to tug my heartstrings, just to demonstrate that they'll hire people from broad range of demographics.

I'm not sure. But it's the first piece of advertising that's moved me in a while.