The Better Mousetrap

LIST LIFE: How lists make us feel alive

 

 

"3 is shy, not like 4, who's a real show-off." 7, I learn, is invisible, while 5 is musical (but short-changed of any super power such as invisibility). 6 is mechanical, 18 is a hunter. And gender divides them all. 3, for example, is a girl, "but 13 is actually a boy". This last revelation is imparted in a tone that suggests it might come as quite the surprise.

 

My son is 7, and while he may simply be exercising his imagination (or messing with my head for mild sport), the very fact he's applying it to numbers implies he has a very different relationship with them to the one I have. 

 

I've never had an instinctive 'feel' for numbers, never engendered them with gender or a superpower. I'd always regarded numbers rather dryly, but of course, everything is a matter of perspective.

 

Recently I've been thinking about numbers, particularly the lists they build, and why we have them; the role they play, the rules they make, and why they rule our lives so much. It's a reasonable enough thing to mull during a daily commute. The 7am alarm, 8:01 train, my 43 minutes between door and desk, the number of emails, received, replied, during that time. The working hours in a 5-day week, the number of times I go to the gym, the length of time I spend there.

 

Modern life seems to very conspicuously be a thing of numeric markers and lists. Like it, list it. Loathe it, you'll still likely give me at least "3 reasons why" you feel the way you do.

 

When I arrive in work, my Inbox lists the new emails that have arrived in a twenty-one minute walk from Marylebone to Charlotte Street.

 

The subscription emails include an invitation to watch 'The 10 best dog ads' (an invitation I can comfortably resist) and read about 'The four watches... (I really must inappropriately spend my money on)"... subject to the number in my savings account. The number will never be enough.

 

Another ‘alert’ tells me about Tikker, a watch that tells the time and counts down the time you have remaining. It’s like the Timex Life Index watch (from 2008) which processed your key biometric inputs and then trended your likely end-date. That was called "the death watch", and named number 7 on PC mags list of “Technologies we can do without”. Spin "life is short so make the most of it all you want", Tikker is just a new entry in next-level creepy.

 

But our fixation with lists has much to do with our feelings towards time - and how it flees, leaving us feeling like we never have enough of it.

 

So we must learn, understand, improve, and quickly. The best tip for assailing this vanishing time: heed a wise list. The 7 best exercises to burn bottom fat; the 6 best mother-in-law put downs or ways to humanely poison your neighbour’s spaniel. And to be more effective at the aforementioned, perhaps a skim of Dr Stephen Covey's "inspirational" book list – the '7 Habits Of Highly Effective People®'?

 

It's even more fundamental than just being a sign of the times and a passing of them. Lists are what we're 'made of'.

 

The Human Genome Project is the ultimate list, a big data attempt to build the definitive biological picture of “life”. Join the right data points, get the algorithm right, and pre-empting and solving diseases might be a maths answer to a very long source code.

 

‘Life’, quite literally, is a genetic list amounting to a built-in expiration date, the stuff of BladeRunner and Gattaca and Logan’s Run. DNA lists give us the know-how to design babies, that will stay healthier and live longer. With the right list, we can push at the edges of our mortality - which returns us to the essentialness of therefore making the most of it, of every 24 hours and how we fill them, which returns us to more lists, so we may be productive, so we may accomplish, achieve all we can in the time we have.

 

The completion of each list like hitting the equals button that calculates a new state of personal order: I am now 'Informed', or 'Inspired'. 'List Completed' = I am now more complete. The 100 albums you must listen to and movies you must see before you die. In the latter case, it's unlikely that will include '10 Rules for Sleeping Around', a new "screw ball sex comedy”. Evidently, promiscuity is a thing of lists, but then, it always was.

 

The 'number of people you really must sleep with (before you die)' is a life-list that varies rather wildly by person. Mick Jagger, aged 70, is a still-rocking jitter-bag of rolling bones said to have bagged north of 4000 women. James Hunt suffered a fatal heart-attack at 45, but speculation of his 5000 sexual conquests went some way to implying that the guy had "lived".

 

Comic book writing legend Alan Moore once described life as “a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."

 

I figure Jagger and Hunt would make it onto Moore’s lucky list. And surely that’s the real skill with any list, to live it well?

 

In my 'right here and now', I'm neither in the office nor commuting in either direction relative to it. It's actually Sunday, the 13th of the 10th, 3:05pm. It's 11 degrees outside, very wet, humidity at 94%, the barometer reading 1009mb. A weather list, and a somewhat gloomy one. I take a call from Dubai, a +971 in the international directory. Their present weather list is rather different.

 

After the call, I turn on the radio. The Radio 1 DJ asks whether OneRepublic’s 'Counting Stars' will be number 1 in the top 40 for 3 weeks running, then hits play.

 

"Everything that kills me makes me feel alive."

 

Everything that kills me: that would be quite the list. I consider - 'Number 1: Tied to a tree in the Amazon to be methodically devoured by a raid of over-peckish army ants.'

 

The very fact I'm not tied to any tree or anything's lunch menu is cause to smile, to feel grateful, to feel alive.

 

Umberto Eco once said that "we like lists because we don't want to die". My feelings towards numbers, particularly towards lists, is changing. Lists make us feel alive, I think.

 

My son runs into the kitchen, breaking my reverie. "Dad! Remember when we talked about numbers? Number 7, he's also a ninja."

 

An invisible ninja? That's pretty awesome.

 

SP. 

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post and Sabotage Times.

ADVERTISING, INTERRUPTED

From Don Draper & Magic Bullets to Don Simpson & Going Native

 

 

Last week, I spent more time than absolutely necessary discussing whether a lion could beat up a tiger. It's hard to put a billable ROI against that kind of agency chat.

During the week, I also read a very good article on ‘Native Advertising’, written by Greg Grimmer, an old friend who's never short on fresh thinking.

Lions and tigers, old friends and new views, I love how certain tangents collide.

Yet in truth, these tangents aren't such tangents.

First, ‘Native Advertising’: a tag initially applied to the evolution of ‘online display advertising’, where online display comes over as too ‘advertisingy’ (hence people ignore and resent it) and so the answer becomes advertising that’s less like ‘advertising’, that’s more like the actual editorial content we all consume by choice. 

The great danger in this is how former ‘offline’ attempts at ‘advertising as editorial’ have played out. Enter: ‘The advertorial’, that most insipid kind of masquerade.

Advertising that’s faking it, trying to mirror the ‘real content’, only where the quality isn’t there, the bias is, and there’s a headline at the top underlining the insincere sham of it all: ‘This is a Promotion’ - how was that ever going to be a great idea? Or an effective one? No points for guessing, I’ve never been a fan. But like discovering a brave new universe, born from the black hole of a previously bad idea, we now have a new and potentially inspired prefix to consider.

 

INTERRUPTION… OF THE WELCOME KIND

‘Online’ is a medium troubled by the same spectral dilemma that haunts the wider advertising community. Do people like advertising, or not, and given technology is bestowing upon us a surfeit of edit buttons, what is advertising’s future?

This was the topic of a Google Squared debate I took part in last week. I didn’t talk about lions fighting tigers (though I will shortly), but my debate does represent a third converging tangent in all of this. The panel included Rob Smith, MD of Ogilvy & Mather and Mike Burgess, Digital Director at BMB. Both Rob and Mike are the kind of industry brains who are going to get as close as anyone to establishing advertising’s future, and while we didn’t collectively crack it in a 1-hour chat, I left my swivel seat with one recurring word.

‘Interruption.’

People invariably hate being interrupted, and the old model of advertising is based on this simple principle. No one welcomes that moment when the movie they’re watching on TV (live or recorded) is gate-crashed by a 3+ minute blast of snake-oil selling.

Ad agencies still sell clients TV work in darkened boardrooms full of nodding heads with the volume dialled to 11. Show that TV ad in the middle of Homeland, and I don’t feel quite the same way about it.

The Super bowl may indeed be the only TV watching exception, where the commercials co-define the pop cultural moment, but the Super bowl is that bold exception (because it’s so damn long and the structure of play so staccato) to an otherwise obvious truth.

The ‘obvious truth’ that interruption is seldom enjoyed prompts the spin-off question: Are there times when people enjoy being interrupted? Can advertising ever be a welcome interruption? Mike Burgess’s citing of style bibles like Vogue (where the advertising is intrinsic to the content, to what the magazine fundamentally is) serve as a glossy full colour affirmation that advertising can be positively received.

‘Welcome Interruption’ loops me back round to 'native', which I don’t think the online community should have all to themselves.

After all, those Prada and Jimmy Choo ads in Vogue are effectively ‘native’, given they complement, even improve, the overall media consumption moment. 

I like this word ‘Native’, and not just because it makes my Northern Hemisphere light-deprived sensibilities think of people wearing flip flops and sarongs and smelling of sun lotion.

I like the word because it posits a ‘new way of being’ for ‘advertising’, equipping brands with a new lingua franca or ‘second language’. In keeping step with these fast-moving times, advertising is being invited to shrug off its now outmoded garbs and blend in with all the indigenous stuff people naturally like and want. I wonder, is it now very possible for advertising to be "non-advertising advertising", no longer the unwelcome intruder, but rather the source of any manner of cool stuff that causes us to grin and declare feelings of awesomeness?  

 

HIGH CONCEPTS & BROWS: A NEW KIND OF MAGIC 

I’ve talked before about brands needing to be Power-Givers, to really bring it to the table, the party, to wherever and whomever. Having good chat (whether on a panel or at a party), rocking up with a metaphorically tidy ‘bottle of’, for brands, this is literally about creating very human experiences - encounters or interactions - that make life better somehow. Intrigue me. Inform me. Educate me. Entertain me. Where these experiences are brought to me BY A BRAND, is this still ‘advertising’?

Sixty years ago, ‘The Thirty Second Ad’ was a magic bullet that consistently hit its mark. Sixty years on and any suggestion that the same kind of advertising convention is going to be similarly effective is potty. Don Draper, and his output, was a product of its time. Today’s ‘Magic Bullet’ needs to look very different – and while no brand has yet landed on the absolute blend of sorcery and armoury, but some are getting closer.

Which brings me to ‘Lions & Tigers’. You see, if someone asks me whether a Lion can beat up a Tiger, I’m interested as hell, drawn close and want to know more. I don’t necessarily want to see 90 seconds of footage of a Tiger and a Lion going at it, but I’d very much like to see a short documentary funded by, say, Patagonia or Timberland, that explores the question (and ideally provides the answer).

If I say to you, as people have recently put to me, have you seen that mountain biker being hunted by a Peregrine Falcon, aren’t you immediately curious how that worked out for rider and bird, and to click HERE if you don’t know?

If I tell you someone, a 'Big Black Little Bit Crazy Woman' called GloZell, is willing to film herself eating a ladle of cinnamon (these kind of antics have earned her 2.25m You Tube subscribers), you might just click HERE to see the faces and noises she makes after ingesting.

While this might sound a bit inane, I’m not suggesting we only interpret ‘native’ as dumbed-down ‘High Concept’, in the Simpson-Bruckheimer ‘One Sentence Pitch’ sense.

In a separate corner of this same native universe, consider Marriot hotels interpretation of ‘Sponsored Content’; a partnership with Fast Company where they’ve created the TravelBrilliantly series, corralling some very clever people to explore and explain what travel might mean these digital days.

Sure, #TravelBrilliantly is 'branded content' because it’s content that the Mariott brand has made happen, but it’s also just plain-and-simple content that I naturally love and gravitate towards and want to talk about. It could just as easily be from WIRED or Mashable. I become grateful to Marriot for being the catalyst, and I start thinking Marriot is a brand with a much higher IQ, irrespective of whether they’re slip-steaming the smarts of others or not. (Check out what a friend of mine, Faris Yakob, has to say about Time Travel and ‘Memory Hacking” here.) 

The effect is also similar to when I recently stayed at a W Hotel and my key card – in addition to opening my door - referenced their partnership with Intel and Roman Coppola, about a short movie collection (and spin-off competition) they’ve made. I think W Hotels are pretty cool, and I actively looked into what kind of film-makers the W are. They’re this kind: CLICK.

 

“IMAGINE IF..?”: THE NEW AGE OF ADVERTISING  

I’m in the front row here-cheering where Greg’s article asserts, “distribution is as crucial, if not more so, than the curation and creation of content. Don't expect the Kevin Costner field of dreams effect”. I also however believe that in the same way that talent outs and cream rises, if you conceive the content equivalent of a Shard or a Gherkin or a Burj Khalifa, then you’re stacking the odds of making an impression on anyone’s horizon.

“Imagine what would happen if you ate a whole ladle of cinnamon… pitted a tiger against a lion… tried to free-fall from the very edge of space?”

The late Don Simpson, Hollywood Fast Lane Lunatic, is living proof that High Concept is no way to live, but it might just breathe new life into the advertising model.

Any brand that bank-rolls the creation of something ‘Very Cool’, that I’d naturally pay to see or read, is a brand I’ll happily say thank-you to, and more likely buy.

"Netflix made history tonight, winning three Emmy awards for House of Cards, becoming the first company to win the awards for online-only shows." (Sep 22^nd, 2013) 

Where Jay Leno declared, “I don’t know what TV is anymore”, it might just be a very good thing if we all embrace the idea of not knowing what 'advertising' is anymore either.

Blockbuster never went knocking on Kevin Spacey’s door, and look how that turned out. Netflix figured the best possible ad they could make was a brilliant TV series (and maybe one of the best and longest TV “ads” of all time?). "Give people what they want” said Spacey, “when they want it, in the form they want it in. It's all content."

Content that I naturally crave: this is the stuff that sells itself. And it’ll sell the brands that make it.

SP.

Article as also appears in MediaTel Newsline, KoganPage.com, Business 2 Community, and Emerging Spaces.